[Here is some documentation from one of  the activities for the ‘re-mapping the senses workshop earlier this year…]

Our sense of taste is directly affected by the colour and smell of the food. Experiments prove that the colour of a drink affects our perception of its sweetness for example. Altering the sound of the food, say adjusting the high-end frequencies while eating crisps can also affect our perception of the crunchiness of those crisps [see the paper here. Playing with these assumptions and expectations can create heightened food experiences. There have been a number of studies that suggest it is possible to simulate Sweetness, bitterness, sourness.

Specifically, we test these settings as claimed by the Vocktail project [see below] to simulate the following sensations…

Sour: magnitude of current: 180 mA, PWM duty cycle: 67%
Salty: magnitude of current: 40 mA, PWM duty cycle: 20%
Bitter: magnitude of current: 80 mA, PWM duty cycle: 43%

For the workshop, we developed an Arduino sketch [Thanks Chris Ball ] and simple circuit to output variable PWM duty cycle with which to perform our own experiments. Here is a basic schematic…

More links and resources…”Virtual ingredients for food and beverages to create immersive taste experiences The sensation of taste as an electronic media”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-015-3162-8

Back to  Re-mapping the senses workshop