You can stop fantasizing about what your favorite song taste like.
Spotify and J. Walter Thompson Brazil have created a way to turn the platform’s 44 million tunes into recipes.
"Flavor of Songs," a campaign for Brazilian cookware brand Tramontina, is driven by an algorithm based on synesthesia, the phenomenon where the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to a similar experience in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. One sense involuntarily influences the other. In this case, sound informs taste.
So how does it work, you ask?
The six-month process started with neuroscientist Dr. Marcelo Costa and conductor João Rocha. They used the principle of synesthesia to classify the millions of songs available in Spotify’s database.
"If you consider a samba school with its various instruments, that really dense part in terms of sound, you can relate that to dense food," explains Rocha.
Thus, Spotify’s parameters became ingredients; dance music was associated with temperature; energy as density/texture; positivity became bitterness/acidity, and musical notes became harmonization.
Based on these parameters, Chef Renato Carioni classified all the main culinary ingredients by assigning notes to each one of them. "If a song is not at all positive, its taste is bitter," says Carioni.
This entire database was put together and originated an artificial intelligence that has the same technology used in financial systems, to "match" Spotify's classification parameters and the different combinations of ingredients cataloged by Carioni.
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, for example, became a foie gras terrine with salmon caviar and cold barley.
Rodrigo Da Matta, ECD at J. Walter Thompson Brazil, said: "Our brief was from Tramontina was to appeal to a younger and more techy audience and get them excited by its stainless-steel line of products. We didn’t shy away from a technologically complex route, which has resulted in a project that appeals to all senses."