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All people share implicit mappings across the senses, which give us preferences for certain sensory combinations over others (eg light colours are preferentially paired with higher-pitch sounds; Ward et al, 2006 Cortex42 264–280). Although previous work has tended to focus on the cross-modality of vision with other senses, here we present evidence of systematic cross-modality between taste and sound. We created four sound continua representing to varying extents phonetic qualities of speech (F1, F2, voice discontinuity, and spectral balance). Sixty-five participants selected their preferred sound to accompany each of the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty, at two different concentrations. We found significant shared preferences among our participants to map certain acoustic qualities to certain types of tastes (eg sweet tastes tend to be mapped to a lower spectral balance than sour tastes). We also found …