Amid one of the busiest weeks for the agency this year, we spent a happy – if somewhat strange – evening working with the lovely folk at Bompas & Parr to launch Sony’s Multi-room speakers for around fifty journalists drawn from across Europe.
You know how, when you change the music in a room, you can change your perception of its atmosphere? We took that logic to the furthest extremes, to see what happens when you start messing about with perceptions of taste, create sound that you can touch and sound that you can see and taste. That’s what Sonic Wonderland was all about – how can these speakers change the way that you perceive the rooms they’re in – and how can you change perceptions using Sony’s equipment?
So it was that, taking the form of an “immersive dinner party,” a collection of show-stopping culinary moments and perfectly-tuned experiments were devised to test how acoustic technology and science can reveal the hidden realms of our senses – visually, aurally and through taste.
Enlisting the unique research and insight of Oxford Professor Charles Spence – and our very own Sonic Sommelier Dom James – guests were guided through a variety of experiences used to elicit an array of psychosomatic responses.
The guests found that the different frequencies they listened to while eating, caused them to experience entirely different impressions of what they were tasting, from high-pitched sweetness to brassy bitterness.
And that was just the tip of the bizarre Bompas & Parr iceberg. as a few Sonic Cocktails later (mixed with a tuning fork), participants visited an ‘Audio Antechamber’ to palate-cleanse their minds with a lab room of scientific ‘Sonic Stations’ featuring a garden where you could play plants like a piano and find out exactly what your signature sounds like (told you it was odd).
With pieces in the pipeline with Creative Review and Harper’s Bazaar, the results Are still flooding in with coverage to date that includes features on PA, ITN and a full page in the Independent on Sunday to boot.
With more to come from our Sony Sonic Wonderland experiments, watch this space for plenty more coverage we’ve got in the pipeline …
