Auditory dining · Research project · 2024–2026
GastroConcerto
Towards designing dining–sound pairings to support culinary creativity.
Overview
GastroConcerto treats sound not as background ambience, but as a material that chefs can compose alongside a dish.
The project collaborates with culinary practitioners to explore auditory elements as programmable “ingredients”. It asks how sounds might be selected, shaped, and timed as part of a chef’s creative process.
Through hands-on design practice and in-the-field studies, the work develops a vocabulary for dining–sound pairings and examines how they can support experimentation without displacing culinary expertise.
- Role
- Lead researcher & designer
- Methods
- Research through design, field study
- Context
- Professional culinary practice
- Output
- System, framework, CHI papers
Research question
How might sound become a creative ingredient in the making—and experiencing—of food?
Contributions
Sound as a culinary material
A design framing that positions auditory elements as malleable ingredients within culinary practice.
A practitioner-centred design process
Methods and system qualities grounded in how chefs ideate, iterate, serve, and reflect on a dining experience.
Knowledge for multisensory HCI
Empirical insights into composing cross-sensory experiences while preserving ambiguity, authorship, and experimentation.
Publication
CHI 2026 · Full paper
GastroConcerto: Towards Designing Dining–Sound Pairings to Support Culinary Creativity
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.