Noise management in dining areas

Researchers from Flinders University in Australia showed that noise in the dining room can affect our assessment of the taste of the food we eat. They created a neural network model that predicts people’s taste ratings based on the noise in the dining room.

The test results are as follows. Additional street noise in the room always reduces the subjective assessment of the dish, while the presence of music improves the taste experience (even if the sound level in the room increases by 47 dB). When assessing taste, non-acoustic factors, such as age and gender, turned out to be less important than acoustic factors: sound level and type of noise.

References:
Alamir, Mahmoud A. “An enhanced artificial neural network model using the Harris Hawks optimiser for predicting food liking in the presence of background noise.” Applied Acoustics 178 (2021): 108022.