Bright Ideas

Tuning into brightness, in both musical tones and wine flavours, can lead to some superlative suprasensory pairings

“A piano note as bright as a lilac aroma,” so proposed the early 20th-century musicologist and scientist Erich von Hornbostel as he pondered the possibility that our senses are intrinsically united. In one of the earliest crossmodal experiments, he explored whether brightness wasn’t just a visual quality, but a suprasensory dimension that bridges sound, scent, and even taste.

Today, as we swirl a glass of Gamay and cue up the latest LCD Soundsystem single, it’s worth pondering whether the sensory synergies of brightness across multiple senses noted by von Hornbostel, resonate in the strongest wine and music pairings. Could the language we use to describe both, point towards deeper, shared sensory structures? Let’s uncork this idea.