According to the latest research in neurogastronomy, music and food have a special relationship: it turns out that the length, timbre, pitch and other characteristics of a piece of music influence what and how we eat. These findings are affecting what music is played in restaurants and cafés around the world – but what does chocolate have to do with all this?
Iconic London department store Fortnum & Mason has joined forces with creative agency Otherway to reimagine its chocolate collection, and the answer came from classical music.
Shoppers can listen to, or even play, the pieces of music printed on the packaging of the chocolates in the Bars of Chocolate collection. Together with music production company Mcasso and composers Nathan Britton and Jasmine Meaden, they created 16 unique piano pieces, each linked to one of the 16 different flavours in the chocolate collection.
Although the idea seems simple, its execution posed challenges: because each “track” had to appear on the packaging, it needed to be short and yet expressive enough to give shoppers a genuine musical and taste experience.
The music is printed on the packaging as traditional sheet music, and the full composition is revealed when the wrapper is opened.
To enhance the overall experience, Otherway also collaborated with Russian artist Victoria Semykina, who designed original illustrations for the chocolates. Each graphic draws inspiration from the piece of music and the flavour of the chocolate in question.
This is how bars such as The Fruit & Nut Fandango came about – showing an intimate dance between a man in a suit and a woman – or The Last Espresso, the front of which bears the trace of spilled coffee, subtly foreshadowing the sensory experience – in both taste and sound – that awaits the consumer, according to a recent article on creativereview.co.uk.
Source: Turizmus Online