#sensoryChristmas Cracker Games

Wrapping ripping, Kings choir, ice cubes cracking, almond trees shaking, Monopoly ataptaptaping, nuts cracking, Quality St squeaking, kids quibbling, Dad snoring, folding foil, Grannie’s whiskers, cashmere socks, Christmas jumpers, wellies walking, turkey steaming, candles burning, candles blown, No5 gifting, fire smoking or chestnuts roasting...

What sounds are you looking forward to hearing this Christmas? What textures? What smells will you savour? We’d love to know @vetyverfeels#sensorychristmas

We have put together some tricks and games to tune in to your senses this Christmas.

Now for a little wine tasting [best to view full screen]...

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What sounds are you looking forward to hearing this Christmas? What textures? What smells will you savour? We’d love to know tweet @vetyverfeels #sensorychristmas

A sensory home: sensory audit

We all know that sensation of coming home and feeling the warm fuzz of familiarity. It's a feeling you recognise but probably can’t quite put your finger on. We’re frequently unaware of the sounds and smells of home, they become wallpaper to our lives, white noise. But when you open your front door, your senses trigger an emotional response, whether that’s a feeling of safety and comfort or something negative. However you feel when you walk through the door, your perception of home and your response to it, is inevitably very different from your visitors.

The only time many of us come close to sensorial awareness in our own homes is when we’ve been away for a couple of weeks, only then can you tell that home has a very particular smell. Sound and smell link directly to the emotional centre in our brains and we log or ‘file’ smells in our brain with the emotion, so you smell , you feel. So is your home a sensory haven? Is it making you feel like you want to? Is it making your visitors feel how you want them to?

Whether you want to re-do your home but keep the same feel, or whether you are going through life changes and want to feel differently in your home, the sensory environment can achieve that. The first thing I do when I move is re-clean everything with my own products, cook with spices, put on the washing machine and light candles. If it doesn’t smell like home, it doesn’t feel like home.

At Vetyver, we frequently work with businesses to create more engaging and more memorable sensory experiences - whether they are bands, beers, retailers or hospitals. We think that the process is equally, if not more, relevant and important at home. 

In our commercial work, we kick-off with a Sensory Audit: a detailed assessment of all aspects of the brand, through every touchpoint and the whole customer experience. We notice ambient sound, smell, touch, colour, textures, materials, temperature, physical space and interaction with people. And the balance between them. We immerse ourselves in the whole journey and build a complete picture of a brand. 

A sensory audit is something you can do in your own home. It will help you work out opportunities for adding sensory elements such as soundscapes or candles, and identify particular areas for consideration. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so before you change anything it’s important to understand your sensory footprint and work out your assets, your obstacles and what you want to achieve.

So how to? We suggest you do it with a friend who doesn’t live with you, they will notice things you're immune to. Prepare a notebook by taking one page each for every room or area of your home: one for bathroom, living room and so on. Then divide each page up into a sections for each of the 5 senses: SMELL, SEE, HEAR, TASTE, FEEL, or download and print our template Matrix to guide you through it.

Paying attention is the name of the game, to each sense in turn and taking a moment to observe and see with a fresh set of eyes and ears. Close your eyes and really concentrate on each sense one by one. And then work out how the elements are making you FEEL. You’ll be amazed by the insights, smells and sounds you haven’t even noticed before. If you are doing it with someone else, get them to do it silently and then talk about it afterwards, so you don't influence each other. 

You might notice that a light emits a low level buzz which puts you on edge, or a clock ticking which calms you down, the smell of rubbish or the smell of honeysuckle drifting in an open window, or the way the dust dances in the sunshine before warming the floorboards at a certain time of the day. Small changes can remove the irritations and make the most of the beauty around you. Just knowing your home better helps you make the most of it. Move the bin, replace a light, or put a reading chair and a tiny table by the window so you remember to take a moment to read, have a cup of tea, toast your toes in the sun and enjoy watching the dust dance in ray of light. 

A sensory audit is fun. We're confident that after you have completed it you will feel more engaged in your home and have a stronger sense of how the five senses impact your mood, health and sense of home. It's a great process to go through before you try out some of the tips and tricks in the other blogs in our Sensory Home Series.

A sensory home: an introduction

A sensory home: multi-sensory dining and scent

A sensory home: multi-sensory dining and sound

A sensory home: multi-sensory dining and sound

We have been exploring how we can use simple tricks turn our homes into a multi-sensory paradise. Drawing from our experience working with brands and companies we are sharing our knowledge and modifying some of our work for everyday use.  Considering our own personal multi-sensory environment can make an incredible difference to the way we live. Last time we looked at smell and how candles can add value to your dining experience. This time, we are staying in the kitchen and dining room, but concentrating on our ears.

Experiments have shown that people enjoy a drink more when listening to music. Simply playing something can make the difference. Curated music and bespoke soundscapes are big part of the work we do to help companies improve their brand experience, and many of these elements can be adapted for home use.

People are more likely to engage in an experience if they think it is authentic. When listening to a soundscape specific sounds become aligned with a past experience and so authenticated by our brains. Memory is powerful and certain songs and sounds drip with potential narratives and associative power. Why not serve ice-cream with the sound of the sea to take your guests back to their childhood holidays. Or bring an Italian feast to life with the authentic sounds of Rome clattering away in the background.

Or, as we did when we in our workshops with IKEA, used the sound of the forest to compliment woodland foods such as mushrooms or venison.This creates a connection to the origins of the ingredients.

Soundscapes can bring certain flavours to the forefront. In a research project for a beer company, we found in our focus group that the sound of wind running through barley helped people focus on this element of the flavour during the tasting. We can think of sound as an ingredient in our cookery, bringing certain parts of the recipe to the forefront.

It’s important to consider volume. Loudness has been proven to directly affect our perception of flavour.  As music increases in volume, we tend to think of things as less sweet, we also tend to notice taste less and eat more. So turn down the tunes if you want people to enjoy the subtle flavours of your lemon souffle. Turn it up for curry night! 

Tempo encourages people to eat more quickly or slowly and pitch plays its part as well. Listening to music of a higher pitch means people perceive things as sweeter. Play a lower pitch sound, and people report their food to be more bitter. A nice idea is to create a playlist for your evening which takes the courses you are serving into consideration. This is a less intimidating than maybe pumping in the sound of the a Moroccan souk over people trying to enjoy your tagine! 

People tend to make judgement of quality taste based on their perceived quality of the music they are listening to and research suggests that this goes beyond personal taste. So sophisticated high quality recordings can make all the difference. Classical music may impress your guests with your sophistication and taste anyway, but it might also be improving the taste of your food.

We all eat, several times a day so, it makes sense to make the most of this time, either having fun with your family, or impressing your dinner guests. Music and soundscapes are a really nice way to add a sense of occasion to a mealtime and they do not need to interfere with the conversation. In fact, they will add to it if they are added with careful consideration.

Music is easily available and free, and soundscapes too are easily purchased or streamed online. We’d love to hear from you about some of your suggestions for what pairings work, and don't.

A sensory home: multi-sensory dining and scent

Following last month's workshops for IKEA as part of the The Dining Club, we are publishing a series of posts to help make the most of your home by using some clever sensory hacks. With no mention of molecular gastronomy, we are sharing some of the skills we have learnt over the years working with brands to make the most of spaces and to tell their stories using all of the senses.

In this blog, we are going to concentrate on smell and how this can affect the experience of eating, one of the most inherently multisensory experiences we engage in day-to-day. Taste is, after all, almost 90% smell and so smell can dramatically alter your enjoyment of food.

Candles are now commonplace in our homes. They range in price from from a couple of pounds to a couple of hundred pounds, are accessible to everyone and are very effective at setting mood. There are hundreds of options of flavours now available, from lemon or lavender, from iMac to bacon. They are most commonly found in the living room, bedroom and bathroom but that isn't a reason not to consider them in the kitchen - or garden or toolshed or office for that matter!

We are often commissioned to explore how science, psychology and cross-modal responses can affect the senses, in commercial environments and campaigns. We know well that scent is an intrinsic part of the taste experience. The science of understanding how different flavours and aromas interact and influence each other is relatively new to science (believe it or not there are still competing scientific ideas about how the nose even works) but there is still a lot we can do. Setting the science aside, trust your intuition and to go with what works for you. Chefs have been doing this for centuries, using their finely developed taste to go come up with radical new combinations of flavours.

Pair scents with flavours

If you are using scent in close proximity to food, consider it as an additional ingredient. Pick combinations that will compliment each other. Would you add the heady aroma of Gardenia to beef? We wouldn’t, but would you add rose or lemon to a Moroccan Lamb Harissa? Yes. Choosing a Moroccan rose candle with a hint of frankincense could transport your tagine, and your guests, to the souks of Marrakesh. Which brings us to the next aspect of pairing scent with food - using scent to create a connection to the origin and style of the food.

Connecting with your food

Where does your food come from? What season is it? What country and culture does the recipe reflect? Scent can enhance your connection with your food and your enjoyment of it.

The Swedish woodland served as our inspiration for our tasting workshop for IKEA and we found some beautiful woodland mushrooms to cook. The origins of the food inspired us to use fern, moss and pine scents to create a connection back to where the food originated and to give a stronger sense of place and authenticity.

Smell doesn’t need to come from a candle or an artificial source. For our workshop we found moss and pine-cones for the mushrooms and dressed the place setting with them. We squeezed lemon on the mushrooms at the table just before tasting so we could enjoy the scent of lemon zest before tasting the mushrooms.

Be unique

So that’s just a few ideas to hopefully get your noses watering as well as your tastebuds. Our advice is to experiment, relax and have fun. Play around and see what works for you, what doesn’t,  and keep mixing it up. Immerse your guests in scent and this will go a long way towards creating a meal they will remember for many years.

If you have had particular successes, or failures, we’d love to hear about it.

There are currently no public sessions planned but do follow us on twitter to keep up to date with what we have coming up. And if you are interested in an event or project please get in touch.

See Also

A sensory home

Sensory eating for IKEA

Sensory beer tasting

How does your brand feel

A sensory home: an introduction

Earlier this month Vetyver ran a series of workshops for IKEA as part of the The Dining Club, a pop-up event in Shoreditch. As part of their #makemorethanjustfood concept, we were asked to host a series of sensory eating workshops.

We normally help companies create unique and powerful sensory brand experiences and events, but this time our workshops were designed to explore how we engage with the senses at home. It was fascinating working with, tasting and exploring the senses with the participants and we had a great response so over the next few weeks, we are going to explore how to engage the senses at home with some ideas and tips.

It’s important to understand that we experience all the senses at once. The key to creating a successful sensory experience is understanding that the senses are interlinked. They work very closely together and they shouldn’t be considered in isolation. Think of it like a graphic equaliser - if all the ‘sensory volumes’ are up at the same time, you get overload. Consider eating: if the sound is loud, your perception of taste will be diminished. If the beat or tempo is fast you will probably eat faster, and more. So your sensory environment completely affects the way that you eat or drink.

To give an example,  have you ever enjoyed a glass of table wine in on holiday and taken it home only to discover it no longer tastes like divine nectar? We have, but why? Because the colour palette, soundscape, temperature, scent and beauty surrounding you entirely change your perception of taste.

So no matter whether you live in a tower block, house or boat; in the city or the wilderness, with strangers, animals, friends or your family, join us in exploring how to make your home your sensory sanctuary.

Over the next few weeks we will be showcasing some of what you can do to bring the joy of taste, smell, touch, sound and sight to your home. Keep and eye on twitter for updates.

See Also

Sensory Eating for IKEA

How does your brand Feel?