The Feeling of a Thing: Curation and Sensory Appeal

How food, music, atmosphere, and environment work together to shape memory, mood, and experience

A Note Before I Begin

I first wrote about this in 2017, mostly as an industry and strategy piece about artists, brands, and experiential partnerships. Revisiting it now, I still think the core idea holds. What has changed is the frame. It feels less interesting to me now as a marketing insight alone and more interesting as a way of thinking about experience itself, how it is built, why some experiences stay with us, and how the same logic applies just as much to ordinary life as it does to luxury brands or hospitality.

Experience Is Built in the Interaction

Most memorable experiences are not built from one great thing. They come together through the coherence and interaction between several elements that seem separate at first, but in combination deepen the whole.

A meal, a song, a drink, a room, a pace, a feeling. We tend to think about these things in isolation, but that is rarely how we actually experience them. They are constantly shaping one another. A meal lands differently with the right music. A drink feels different in the right room. The same conversation can feel flat or electric depending on the atmosphere holding it.

That is what makes sensory appeal interesting to me now. Not just as a branding tactic or hospitality trick, but as a way of thinking about experience itself. A lot of what people remember is not one element in isolation. It is the feeling the elements created together.

The Whole Starts Doing More Work

We understand some of this intuitively already. Certain songs feel like certain meals. Certain drinks seem to belong to certain moods. A bright, airy sound can feel citrusy, sharp, and clean. Something slower and heavier can feel smoky, bitter, darker around the edges. Even without formal language for it, people make these sensory connections all the time.

What makes it more than instinct is that those interactions are not imagined. Work associated with Charles Spence on “sonic seasoning” has helped show that sound can influence how people perceive sweetness, bitterness, acidity, and depth in food and drink, and recent brand experiments have continued to use that idea explicitly. Food & Wine described Barilla’s 2024 Al Bronzo project as built around sonic seasoning, with Charles Spence assessing pasta shapes and flavors so a custom soundtrack could enhance the eating experience.

That matters because food and drink were never only about taste to begin with. Smell is there. Texture is there. Sound is there. Pace is there. The room is there. The way something looks before it ever touches your mouth is there. Once you really take that in, the experience stops being about isolated parts and starts becoming something closer to composition.

That is the real idea here. The whole can start doing more work than any individual part ever could.

Coherence Matters More Than Abundance

A lot of forgettable experiences are built from good pieces that never become a whole. The food is solid. The playlist is fine. The room looks good enough. The drinks are decent. Nothing is wrong exactly, but nothing is deepening anything else either. The elements sit beside one another instead of working together, so the experience stays flatter than it should.

That is the difference coherence makes.

The best experiences do not always have more. More often they have better alignment. The right sound can make a dish feel more vivid. The right pace can make people settle in instead of drifting out. The right atmosphere can make a conversation open up where it otherwise would have stayed on the surface.

That is true in restaurants, in branded experiences, and in ordinary life. Too much gets made of abundance. More options. More variety. More inputs. But in practice, coherence usually does more than excess. A few things that belong together will often beat a lot of good things that do not.

Why This Still Matters for Artists and Brands

This is part of why I still think the original instinct behind this piece holds up.

Most artist-brand collaboration is forgettable because it stays shallow. A logo on a bottle. A campaign. A capsule. A borrowed audience. There is no real world being built, no sensory logic underneath it, no feeling strong enough to stay with you once the novelty wears off.

The more interesting opportunity is to create something fuller. A drink, menu, or environment tied to the emotional world of an album. A restaurant experience built around sound rather than treating music as filler. A retail environment where the visual language, scent, sound, and pacing all reinforce the same atmosphere.

Luxury brands and high-end hospitality have understood this for a while. Krug still builds sensory ritual into its brand world through Krug iD, which lets people enter a bottle’s six-digit code to discover the story of that bottle, the Cellar Master’s impressions, food pairing suggestions, music pairings, and more. The Krug app likewise presents music pairings through Krug Echoes. The Fat Duck’s “Sound of the Sea” remains one of the clearest restaurant examples: seafood served with ocean audio to heighten the sensory and emotional effect of the dish, an approach Heston Blumenthal explicitly linked to experiments with Charles Spence at Oxford.

Not because every experience needs to become some immersive spectacle, because it does not. What matters is resonance.

People do not build loyalty only through what they notice. They build it through what they feel. They remember what had atmosphere, what had point of view, what felt composed instead of assembled. That was true when I first wrote about this, and if anything it feels more true now.

What This Looks Like as a Way of Living

What interests me more now is that this logic extends far beyond brands, artists, or restaurants. It applies to ordinary life, to the life you are actually in.

A lot of people only think about experience when they are planning something special. A dinner party. A trip. A date. An event. But life itself is made up of sensory experiences that are constantly shaping how you feel, how you move, and what you remember. Your home, your routines, what you wear, what you eat, what you listen to and the spaces you work in all can impact the energy in your life and around your relationships. It can influence the pace and texture of your days.

All of that matters more than people tend to think, and the quality of life is often shaped less by one standout element than by the coherence between those parts.

It matters in dating. A date is never just the conversation. The room, the music, the lighting, the drink, and the pace all shape whether the experience feels generic or intimate, stiff or alive, forgettable or distinct.

It matters in work. Focus is not only discipline. It is also environmental. Sound, light, ritual, clutter, and pace all affect whether work feels supported or constantly interrupted by friction.

It matters in creativity. Creative energy is sensitive to setting, and the right combination of sound, space, texture, and rhythm can help you enter the state the work needs instead of waiting for inspiration to arrive on its own.

It matters in the home. A space is never only visual. It has a sensory tone. The way it sounds, smells, holds light, and moves affects whether it feels calm, cold, restorative, stale, grounded, or chaotic.

And it matters socially. Shared experiences deepen when the environment supports ease, openness, and memory. That is part of why some nights linger and others disappear almost immediately.

In practical terms, that might look like:

• building a home environment where objects, lighting, scent, and sound all support the same mood

• matching the pace and structure of a meal to the kind of interaction you want people to have

• treating music as part of the emotional architecture of a room rather than as background filler

• thinking about style not as isolated pieces, but as part of how you want to move through a given environment

• making your routines feel more intentional by aligning the sensory details around them

This is where curation becomes practical. Not as aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake, but as a way of making life feel more intentional, more supportive, and more alive.

Where Curation Becomes Creation

We usually talk about creation as if it only counts when it looks original and singular. Writing something, making a song, designing an object, or even building a company. All of that counts, obviously. But there is also creation in composition, in shaping a room, in building a meal, in putting together food, music, drink, conversation, and atmosphere so that they become something more than their parts.

Experience is one of the places where curation becomes creation.

That is why these details are not trivial. They are not decorative extras sitting around the edges of life. They help shape memory, mood, openness, desire, focus, and connection. They influence whether something feels scattered or cohesive, whether it holds or slips away.

That is also where elevation happens. Not through extravagance or performative luxury, but through thoughtfulness, through coherence, through caring enough about ordinary elements to let them reinforce one another instead of compete.

What It Means

The larger opportunity here is not just for marketers, artists, or hospitality people. It is for anyone who wants to live with more intention.

A meal can be more than food. A room can be more than furniture. A date can be more than logistics. A gathering can be more than people showing up in the same place at the same time. A day can feel different based on what surrounds it.

Experience is built in the interaction between elements people usually think of separately. When those elements align, they do not just sit next to one another. They deepen one another, and the result is not merely a better version of each individual part but a stronger whole.

People feel that, even when they cannot fully explain it. And that is usually what they remember.