A Multimodal Symphony: Integrating Taste and Sound through Generative AI
Authors: name: Matteo Spanio, name: Massimiliano Zampini, name: Antonio Rodà, name: Franco Pierucci
Organization: Centro di Sonologia Computazionale

In recent decades, neuroscientific and psychological research has traced
direct relationships between taste and auditory perceptions. This article
explores multimodal generative models capable of converting taste information
into music, building on this foundational research. We provide a brief review
of the state of the art in this field, highlighting key findings and
methodologies. We present an experiment in which a fine-tuned version of a
generative music model (MusicGEN) is used to generate music based on detailed
taste descriptions provided for each musical piece. The results are promising:
according the participants' (n=111) evaluation, the fine-tuned model produces
music that more coherently reflects the input taste descriptions compared to
the non-fine-tuned model. This study represents a significant step towards
understanding and developing embodied interactions between AI, sound, and
taste, opening new possibilities in the field of generative AI. We release our
dataset, code and pre-trained model at: https://osf.io/xs5jy/.