This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily: a Canary Island tribe calls the shape on the left “kiki” and the one on the right “bouba”.
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In tests conducted with both English and Tamil speakers, 95% to 98% picked the curvy shape as bouba and the jagged one as kiki, suggesting that the human brain is somehow able to extract abstract properties from the shapes and sounds.
Which one of these shapes is ‘bouba’ and which one is ‘kiki’? According to Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, the vast majority of people choose kiki for the orange angular shape and bouba for the purple rounded shape. Turns out the same thing works with food - more from the BBC:
Working with world-renowned chef Heston Blumenthal, he is trying to directly combine an auditory experience into a dish.
“We’ve been giving people dishes and asking them questions about them, including is that food more of a ‘bouba’ or a ‘kiki’? Or is it a ‘maluma’ or ‘takete’?” he told BBC News.
He said that two of the best examples are brie, which is “very maluma”, whereas cranberries are “very takete”.
The Bouba-Kiki Effect and First Impressions
(via Santiago Iniguez: Brett Steele: The Bouba-Kiki Effect and First Impressions)
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