When thinking about and studying the effect of music on the mind and body, my focus is usually on the music…as you might expect! In reality I have given little if any thought to the impact of the silences in music. This week I was introduced to the power of silences and learned a little about the way they can be used very effectively to maximise musical engagement. It all started when I got an email from a 6 Music executive producer Mark Savage. Mark was putting together a short feature, all about pauses in music and how they affect the listener. It was all based on a novel by…

This week, I have found a little something to tickle the taste buds! I have been reading a 2010 article published in Perception entitled “ A sweet sound? Food names reveal implicit associations between taste and pitch”. This article comes from one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of cross modal research and multisensory perception, Professor Charles Spence. And the conclusions he and his co-author (Anne-Sylvie Crisinel ) lay down include interesting but very much still open ideas about how our perception of food taste might be influenced by musical sounds. We live in a world of rich multisensory experiences, within which eating is one of the most…