A lamp-shaped device, artificial intelligence and the science of taste: Soundfood, the Italian project on sonic seasoning, is born
There is a lamp on the table. It doesn’t illuminate. It rings, though. And what plays is not a playlist chosen at random, it is a song composed specifically for the dish you are about to taste. No, it’s not a bizarre dream of those that you then forget as soon as you wake up. This is the idea behind Soundfood, an all-Italian project that crosses neuroscience, artificial intelligence and gastronomy.
The founder is Franco PierucciUmbrian by origin, Turin by adoption. Not a pure gastronome, but the commercial director of a financial company. And also a musician. For years he had been hanging out in restaurants with a recurring feeling: the soundtrack of the meals was almost always disappointing, random, disharmonious with the food served. The inspiration comes from Ryūichi Sakamoto, a famous Japanese composer who passed away in 2023, who had created tailor-made playlists for a restaurant whose kitchen he frequented but hated the sound environment. From there, from 2021, Pierucci begins to build something more ambitious.
What’s behind the sound
The project was born from an original idea, yes. But at the base it also has a solid researchbuilt in collaboration with two universities. The University of Trento contributes together with Massimiliano Zampini, professor of Cognitive Sciences and colleague of Charles Spence of Oxford, one of the advisors of Soundfood, who studies the so-called sonic seasoning for decades. The University of Padua, however, through Professor Antonio Rodà and his computational sonology centre, among the most important in Europe, works on the development of artificial intelligence tools for musical composition. A dedicated research path has been active in Padua for the third year now.
«With them we created a whole neuroscientific mapping of sound and how it impacts the sensation of taste», explains Pierucci. Even theUniversity of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo is involved, through professors Riccardo Migliavada and Luisa Torri, responsible for the Sensory Analysis Laboratory.
The central point is precisely this: a generic playlist has no ability to interact with the taste of a specific dish, because it was not designed for that. Each course, according to Soundfood’s logic, must have its own score.
The sound lamp
This particularly complex research finally translated into the Soundlamp, a patented, portable device in the shape of a table lamp, designed with the architect David Montagna Baldelli and designed by Stefano Chiocchini, professor at the Italian Institute of Design in Perugia and winner of the 2022 Compasso d’Oro Award. An extraordinary object capable of creating a sound bubble limited to the table: from five meters away you can hardly hear anything, which makes it discreet and non-invasive for other guests.
«It was important to give restaurants a simple, manageable and immediately effective tool», says Pierucci. The Soundlamp is not yet on the market, but is expected to be launched within a few months. The business model should include a monthly subscription, around 200 euros, which includes tailor-made musical composition and its diffusion. The ideal customer, at least in the initial phase, is thehaute cuisine. The project has already involved Maurizio Serva from the La Trota restaurant, in the province of Rieti, to map his dishes and build a coherent path between courses, music and wine.
The future of the musical food and wine experience
Music, in this case, is not just an element of atmosphere: it is scientifically proven that it increases food consumption. A fact that transforms Soundfood from a mere gastronomic curiosity into a potential economic management tool for restaurateurs.
Restaurants like Sublimotion in Ibiza or Paul Pairet’s Ultraviolet in Shanghai have already done so multisensorial their brand. Soundfood wants to bring that logic outside of haute cuisine, with a scalable and accessible solution. The artificial intelligence composes, a music designer refines, the restaurant serves the dish. And the customer enjoys it, even through music.
