Do you think pinot grigio “smells” like a note from a clarinet? Does the sound of a bass “taste” like a dark red Barolo?

If so, you are using “crossmodal” associations, drawing on analogies from various senses in order to create a picture of the world. And you’re not odd. A new study from Oxford University scientists shows that taste and sound are intimately linked.  

An extreme form of this phenomenon is synesthesia, a condition in which one might see the number 8 as red, for example. But most people make such crossmodal associations all the time without giving it much thought.

Hear something in that wine? A new study shows a "crossmodal" link between taste and pitch.

Imagine yourself on one side of a small hill when suddenly you hear a very loud, deep-toned thump coming from the other side. Your brain instantly assembles a picture of the shape and size of the object that made that sound – Baltimore Ravens tackle Bryant McKinnie (6 feet 8 inches tall,  360 pounds) stamping his feet, say.

This ability is a survival tool, Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new study said. “People learn the statistics of their environment and any statistical regularity between cross-sensory features of that environment,” he explained. Knowing that big objects almost always make low-pitch sounds, “helps you predict the future and hence respond more rapidly.” Even if you can’t see the possible predator around the bend, you “hear” his size.

Until now, a crossmodal link between taste and pitch hadn’t been scientifically validated. So Spence and Ph.D student Anne-Sylvie Crisinel used a commercially available aroma kit designed to train amateurs in the fine art of wine description to prove that aromas evoke musical tones.

Thirty people sniffed various samples (like almond, apple, smoked, hay, cedar, caramel). Then they had to choose from a standard database of notes played by four types of instruments (piano, strings, woodwind, brass) in a range of pitch. A subset of the test participants were blindfolded because darker colors tend to be associated with lower pitch, and since some of the odor samples had a dark color, they didn’t want to screen for visual bias.

Blindfolded or not, significant associations emerged. Few subjects linked brass with blackberry, for example, but many associated it with piano. Hardly anybody connected piano with musk, but many linked it to brass. Fruit odors were consistently associated with high pitched notes. That confirmed an earlier study by Crisinel and Spence showing that sweet and sour flavors were also associated with high pitched notes. 

This effect apparently works the other way, too. Another scientist recently asked different musicians to play pieces of music with adjectives like “bitter,” “salty” and “sweet” in mind. Though the musicians could play whatever they wanted, consistent patterns emerged.

Business has taken notice. According to Spence, “there is a growing field of synesthetic marketing where people try to use such cross-sensory mappings to capture the multisensory attributes of their product or brand, like the fragrance or taste, through the use of appropriate sounds and visuals in TV or radio adverts.” Some restaurants already use music in an attempt to boost the liking and intensity of the flavors of the food they serve, he said.

So the next time you’re shopping for wine, and see a description saying “notes of deep-forest woodiness,” you can decide if you really feel like tasting Beethoven’s Fifth.

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The hand you use to write, brush your teeth, and throw a ball may also tip people off to your taste in music, a new study reveals.

An Ohio researcher has found that people with a strong preference for using their right hand for most everything they do, seem to like popular types of music and tend to shy away from less familiar genres, especially bluegrass and reggae.

Strong righties, the study suggests, may be less open to new musical experiences and tend to gravitate toward styles they're more familiar with.

The research also found that people who are mixed-handed, meaning they use their non-dominant hand for at least two activities but it does not mean ambidextrous, reported broader musical interests. They showed greater "open-earedness," or a stronger liking of unpopular musical styles and more willingness to listen to them.

Many factors influence our music preferences, so why would hand choice matter? In part, it's affected by what's happening between the ears -- in the brain.

"Mixed-handers are more 'in touch' with a wide variety of right hemisphere processes," says study author Stephen Christman, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. The right hemisphere of the brain plays a key role in updating thoughts and beliefs and in allowing us to see things in new ways, he explains, while the left hemisphere tends to stick with the tried and true.

Christman notes that about 80 percent of left-handers are mixed-handers while about 60 percent of righties are strong-handed.

The study, published in the journal Psychology of Music, looked at 92 college students who completed a hand preference survey. Forty-nine students were strong right-handers and 43 were mixed-handed.

Four participants were strongly left-handed, too small a group for statistical analysis. But  other studies have found that the taste preferences of strong left-handers tend to resemble strong right-handers more than mixed-handers.

Students were asked to rate how often they listened to 21 different musical genres and their enjoyment of them. Nine were considered "popular" based on recording industry sales figures and the rest were "unpopular." Popular categories included classic rock, heavy metal, country and rap/hip-hop. Unpopular genres ranged from jazz and world to folk and reggae.

The top three musical choices of strong right-handers were R&B, modern pop and alternative rock; mixed-handers favored R&B followed by alternative rock and modern rock.

Although this study looked at college students, Christman suspects his findings would still apply to middle-age and older adults. He says "many of our enduring musical preferences are formed during our high school and college years, and they persist into adulthood."

Still, those interests can expand. Christman advises strong-handed people to keep exposing yourself to new forms of music and listening to unfamiliar genres. "Give the music a little time, and you may find yourself developing a liking for it and rewarded by broader musical horizons."

That's what happened to him. Christman's musical tastes have long favored acoustic/folk-based genres. But when his daughter started bringing home CDs by Eminem and Ludacris, the mixed-hander quickly developed an intense liking for rap and hip-hop.

What's been your experience? Are you right-handed, left-handed, mixed-handed? What kind of music is your favorite?

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Dave Hogan / MTV via Getty Images

Redfoo of LMFAO knows exactly what it takes to get a song permanently stuck in your head. Now, researchers are getting a clue, too.

When I take my early morning spinning classes, my weary brain is in a vulnerable state. Maybe that's one reason why the chorus of a particular tune, like LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" or Katy Perry's "Firework," played during the workout gets trapped inside my head for the rest of the day -- and night -- and the next day. 

Known as earworms, these random snippets of songs or melodies pop into our minds repeating themselves again and again like a broken record. For me, another one was that silly jingle from the McDonald's filet-of-fish commercial, which undoubtedly would delight advertisers but I found both amusing and mildly annoying.

So it helps to know that earworms are an incredibly common experience: Studies suggest that 90 percent of people get them at least once a week. Over the last decade, researchers have spent time collecting data to learn who gets earworms, how often they occur, how long they last and which songs won't budge from our brains.

Now, a new British study in the journal Psychology of Music has tried to understand their origins. They looked at how earworms, which psychologists call involuntary musical imagery, get started in the first place.

Researchers collected data from 604 people who completed an online survey. After analyzing the responses, they identified four main triggers for earworms. The most common one was music exposure, either recently hearing a tune or repeatedly hearing it. A second reason was memory triggers, meaning that seeing a particular person or word, hearing a specific beat, or being in a certain situation reminds you of a song.

The third reason for earworms your emotional frame of mind, or "affective states."  Feeling stressed, surprised or happy when you hear a song may make it stick in your head. And a fourth cause was "low attention states."  A wandering mind, whether from daydreaming or dreams at night, can set off this involuntary musical imagery. 

"I was initially surprised by the sheer number of idiosyncrasies within the earworm surveys -- the number of different tunes people heard and the number of unique circumstances where earworms popped up," says study author, Victoria Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London.

But it makes sense, she says, since "these spontaneous mental tunes appear to be a typical everyday consequence of the way that our brains process music."

And these "sticky songs" can be a tune you hear often or a brand new one. "Earworms are likely to be as individual as we are in both our musical tastes and music listening habits," explains Williamson.

Asked what to do when you get one, Williamson says she'll be trying to find out how people control them in her next research project." But in the meantime, she offers up this advice: "I find that occupying my mind with a task helps -- reading a book, doing a puzzle or talking to a friend."

What about you? Tell us what song has stuck in your head recently and what may have triggered it. 

Related:

• Song stuck in your head? You've got an earworm
• 'Come on, Irene'? Why we mishear song lyrics
• Blinded by the lyric? Study reveals why we get the words wrong

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The adolescent brain might not be such a teenage wasteland after all.

Recent research suggests that the activity in teen brains may have some Nostradamus-like qualities when it comes to predicting the hits or misses of popular music.

In a small study, scientists recruited 27 adolescents, ages 12 to 17. They asked each kid to listen to 60 15-second clips of songs from largely unknown artists found on MySpace. The clip included either the hook or chorus of each song, and volunteers only listened to tunes from their three favorite musical categories, which ranged from country, rock and indie to hip-hop, blues and metal.

Researchers recorded the teens' reactions to each song using brain-imaging scans, and they also asked participants to rate how much they liked the music on a scale of one to five stars. By using unfamiliar musicians and vocals, scientists hoped to get a raw response, as if teens were hearing the track for the first time.

For three years after the scanning took place, the scientists gathered data on each song's sales figures to see which ones were fan faves or flops.

Although the teens' tastes in music from their likability ratings showed no link to a song's commercial success, their brain scans told another story: Activity in the ventral striatum -- the brain's reward region -- was predictive of future sales figures and popularity.

"We found that when an area of the brain associated with reward and anticipation was active while listening to the song, chances were greater that the song would eventually go on to sell more than 20,000 units," says Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory University's Center for Neuropolicy.

While the teens brains displayed a modest knack for picking out songs that would sell at least 20,000 units -- about one-third of the brain images could predict this -- they were even more accurate at identifying failures: Nearly 90 percent of the songs that showed a weak response in the brain's reward region had tepid sales.

Most of the study songs were duds with dismal sales, but three were industry hits (500,000 units sold) including "Apologize" by OneRepublic and two country cuts, "Don't Laugh at Me" by Mark Wills and "Drink, Swear, Steal, and Lie" by Michael Peterson. But none of these tunes were in the teens' top 10 in eliciting brain activation so they weren't exactly hit-predicting machines.

"The fact that there was any predictive power at all was surprising," says Berns, the study's lead author. "There are so many songs released each year and so few hits, that the odds were stacked against us."

The study appears in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Related:

What 'Jeopardy' tells us about women and wagering

Sleepiness makes fatty foods extra tempting

What's up with deja vu? Your inquiring minds want to know

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