It is a well-known fact that taste cannot be disputed, but it can be manipulated, even with the simplest of means. Tupac, The Notorious B.I.G and Dr. Thank Dre. Because if we listen to hip-hop with food, we like it better – at least cheese. This is the conclusion of a study commissioned by the French dairy industry association CNIEL.
The experimental setup: A loaf of Comté, 100 test subjects and a wild selection of songs. The participants had to taste seven pieces of cheese to changing music and then give their ratings. The test subjects did not have the information that the samples were always the same cheese, and they did not come up with it either. The ratings indicate much more that the study participants tasted the cheese samples differently from piece to piece.
While a third of the test subjects rated the piece of cheese that was served to jazz music as unsuccessful, the hip-hop cheese performed best among the test eaters. 24 percent rated this piece as the best. The pieces that were served with rock and electro also did well with 16 and 18 percent.
All cheese? Aspiring artists from the University of the Arts in Bern found out in 2019 that music can be an ingredient that makes cheese tastier in a variety of ways. For example, they had eight cheese wheels mature in wooden boxes for almost seven months while listening to songs from different music genres, including Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" and Mozart's "Magic Flute". The idea: to bring the microorganisms in the cheese into the right vibration.
The experiment was not pulled out of thin air. After all, researchers from India had already been able to prove a few years earlier that microorganisms react to music. Their growth was stimulated. According to the results of the study, published in the journal Microbiology, they grew up to 40 percent better. The research team assumed that the membrane permeability of the microorganisms had changed as a result of the sonication. "The audible sound in the form of music used in this study was able to affect the growth, metabolism and antibiotic susceptibility of microbes," they reported.
Back to the cheese: as it turned out, the music actually had an influence on the Emmentaler’s maturing process. But not every genre to the same extent. In this experiment, too, it was a song by the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest that had a positive effect on the cheese taste, as it turned out in a blind tasting after the small experiment and later supported by the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich could become.
According to this, the hip-hop cheese that had been exposed to low frequencies contained more free and bound amino acids than found in the other cheeses, as well as more amino acids and propionic acid. Bottom line, this made for a fruitier taste.
Sources: Study: Music and Microorganisms 1, Study: Music and Microorganisms 2
