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.
Workshop Prompts & Gallery
Prompts from PLIX
PLIX Community Remixes
PLIX Community 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)
Materials
Supply Kit
Zine
Zine ↓
Remixable Zine ↓
Facilitation
Playtest and Plan
Remember: There’s no one right way to prepare for a workshop. Use these steps as a loose guideline for planning to run this activity.
- Choose one of our prompts, or come up with a prompt that suits your library community. Our activity guides are for getting you started—feel free to change or create new design elements to suit your local community! All PLIX activity guides are designed for a minimum of 1–2 facilitators
- Gather materials and print out the zine.
- Make an example project. Try it out with friends and colleagues. Thoughtfully incomplete, good examples feature a variety of approaches and starting points. Use them to inspire learners to make something uniquely their own. → Guide to Making Activity Examples
- Try the activity with your patrons. Set a date and time. Easily promote your workshop with our editable → Sonic Seasoning flyer template
- Populate your workshop space with diverse example projects. Create and play together!
- Reflect on what you’ve done and consider doing a remix!
Facilitation 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!
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! 🖍
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.
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.
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?
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 also 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