Welcome to PLIX Sonic Seasoning! Do you eat with your ears? How can we encourage healthy eating through sound?
🥰 Ages 5+ 🕐 1–1.5 Hours 👩👧👦 up to 16 Participants 🍎 1–2 Facilitators 🎨 Craft Materials
Sonic Seasoning explores how using different auditory seasoning filters can help regulate eating behaviors in real time. This activity also encourages people to eat slower and more mindfully. There are many benefits to eating slower, including improving our dental and digestive health!
→ Learn about the science and research behind Sonic Seasoning in this news article.
Imagine
Activities can be adapted in many ways — below are some ideas to help you imagine how your activity might look like.
Remix an Idea Prompt
Get Inspiration from the PLIX Community
by Katie Storey, Liverpool Public Library, NY
This take-and-make activity invites learners and families to explore the influence of music on food, and slow down their eating!
by the PLIX team
Try different ways to listen to each others’ crunching while you also eat!
by the PLIX team
Rate your favorite and least favorite foods in different ways. Add your own categories for ratings.
by the PLIX Team
An auditory dining experience in a box! What other ways can you change the sounds of your eating experience?
Prepare
Gather Materials
Review and Print Resources
Sonic Seasoning Book Connections
I Hear a Pickle, by Rachel Isadora Ages 3+ Recommended by Clara Hendricks (Cambridge Public Library)
MunchA! MuncHa! MuNcha by Candace Fleming Ages 4+ Recommended by Anthony (PLIX)
PLIX Zines are a supplementary resource for patrons and librarians to refer to. Use our guide to cut and assemble them.
Love our zine, but it doesn’t fit your adaptation of the activity? Remix our zine with this Google Slides template!
Remixable Flyer
Jump right into promoting your workshop with this flyer template
Facilitate
This activity is designed to invite learners of all backgrounds into crafting and exploring sounds. The materials used in this activity are intentionally low-cost and friendly to encourage participants to try new things, mess around, make mistakes, and experiment. When facilitating this activity, we encourage you to support this tinkering mindset!
Tips
This activity is designed to invite learners of all backgrounds into tinkering the sounds of materials, and share their food interests. The materials used in this activity are intentionally low-cost and friendly to encourage participants to try new things, mess around, make mistakes, and experiment. When facilitating this activity, we encourage you to support this tinkering mindset!
✋🏽 Hold the food!
Young patrons can be very excited for the food you’re offering. Hold off distributing the food until after introducing the activity or having them read and engage with the zine. Some librarians suggest coloring the zine! 🖍
💡 Inexpensive, familiar materials support tinkering
The materials used in this activity are intentionally low-cost and friendly to encourage participants to try new things, mess around, make mistakes, and experiment.
😋 Don’t yuck my yum!
As we dive into cultural food territory, foreign dishes may draw negative knee-jerk reactions. Discouraging these reactions outright may dissuade some from participating in the activity. Instead, ask questions to foster curiosity Support and maintain a respectful and inviting learning environment by placing the focus on patron’s different sensory experiences of their food.
📣 Crafty sounds
This activity also encourages creative thinking about the sound of craft materials! What sounds can paper make? What about pens or pom poms? Can sounds be tasty?
into creative learning facilitation with our Self-Guided Mini Course. It’ll also help you get started running your first PLIX workshop.
What We ❤️ About This Activity
🌎 Remixable for all celebrations of food! This activity can be adapted for seasonal foods, holidays, cultural celebrations, and local food events.
🥗 Mindful eating We can’t stop thinking about the sound of our food! This activity really stuck with our beta-testers as they went about their daily food-filled lives.
🥰 Peers, play, and passion Encouraging conversations around food, and experimenting with different sound experiences and craft materials makes this a very social activity. Try this with groups and learners of different ages!
About PLIX Sonic Seasoning
This activity was developed in collaboration with Clara Hendricks and Saffana Anwar of Cambridge Public Library, and Rebecca Kleinberger (Professor at Northeastern University and Affiliate Researcher at the MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future group). The research is based on Rebecca’s work with Akito van Troyer, Professor at Berklee College of Music, and Qian Janice Wang, Professor at Aarhus University.
This activity was designed in response to the Cambridge Science Festival’s 2022 call for their new Science + Food theme.
Other ways to engage with PLIX Sonic Seasoning
- Questions? Ask them on the PLIX Discussion Forum 🙋♀️
- Share your experience running this activity on Twitter or Instagram and tag us @heyplix