GastroConcerto: Towards Designing Dining–Sound Pairings to Support Culinary Creativity

Sounds play a crucial role in shaping dining experiences. Recently, designers have increasingly integrated them into interfaces that connect diners with food. Yet, little is known about how sounds can function as culinary materials to enrich chefs’ creativity, particularly in creating meaningful auditory interactions that resonate with their culinary creations. Hence, we present GastroConcerto, an auditory dining system that combines a magnetic contact microphone equipped under the plate with a companion mobile application. This system delves into the interactive space between diners and their food to introduce a novel interactive mechanism of dining–sound pairing, enabling chefs to design specific auditory interactions that respond to diners’ individual interactions with the food on dining containers. Through a within-subjects study and field deployment, we examined how GastroConcerto enriches chefs’ creative practices in crafting "sonic dish" experiences. Ultimately, our goal is to shift the ownership of auditory interaction design from interface designers to chefs, thereby supporting their culinary creativity.