A new, quirky study found hip-hop can make cheese taste better

Listening to classical music can do many things for the mind and body. Mozart and Vivaldi are known to provide a better night’s sleep, decrease blood pressure, ease pain and relieve stress. However, there’s one thing it can’t do. Apparently, it can’t make your cheese taste better. Leave that to hip-hop.

A recent Swiss experiment, dubbed “Cheese in Surround Sound,” found mature Emmental cheese reacted best to hip-hop music exposure, giving the cheese a unique and fruity flavor.

Last September, sound arts students from Bern University of the Arts (HKB) and the Swiss town of Burgdorf partnered in this culinary art experiment to test whether sound waves affect the metabolic processes in ripening cheese to the extent that a sono-chemical impact on taste and flavor can be detected.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear “culinary art experiment,” playing music at cheese is not what comes to mind. I think of fun food creations, like cotton candy burritos, foot-tall ice cream cones and pizza pockets. But hey, if playing classic rock to my salad will make it taste better, maybe I’d eat more salad.

Beat Wampfler, a famed cheesemaker, provided the students with nine 22-pound wheels of the finest Emmental cheese. Each one was individually placed in a wooden box inside the Käsehaus K3 stone cellar, where mini transmitters pumped a range of sound frequencies and musical pieces into the cheese for 24 hours a day over a seven month period.

“All the energy is directly resonating inside of the cheese,” Michael Harenberg of Bern University of Arts told Reuters.

Each cheese wheel was surrounded by a specific sound, five musical pieces and three sounds at different frequencies. The last wheel was left in peace with no music or frequency to act as a reference box.

Three pieces of cheese rocked out to either W.A. Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or A Tribe Called Quest’s “We Got (the Jazz).” One cheese wheel absorbed Vril’s “UV” and another Yello’s “Monolith.” An additional three were exposed to varying frequencies of 25 kHz, 200 kHz and 1000 kHz.

The Bern University students questioned if bio-acoustics had any effect on the ripening process.  

One question I have for the experiment is why the students chose the songs they did. “Monolith” aired in 1997, “We Got (the Jazz)” was released in 1991 and “The Magic Flute” was written in 1791. Even Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is 48 years old. Would Jay-Z, Kanye West or Drake have made the cheese taste even better? If humans react well to these modern artists, why not cheese?

In March 2019, the cheese was chemically analyzed for flavor substances. A blind taste test was held seven months later with a panel of Swiss chefs, politicians and artists who sampled cheese from each wheel. Each panelist agreed that the cheeses which were played at with hip-hop or low frequencies tasted sweeter than the rest.

How reliable can a taste test from politicians be? If they put Bobby Flay or Gordon Ramsey on the panel, then maybe I would be more willing to believe in this experiment.

The cheese also endured a sensory consensus analysis carried out by food technologists from the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The analysis concluded “the cheeses exposed to music had a generally mild flavor compared to the control test sample,” stated the food technologists. Their report also confirmed the cheese exposed to hip-hop music displayed a discernibly stronger smell and stronger, fruitier taste than the other test samples.

“This novel collaboration with the HKB forms the production basis for an innovative product with a significant marketing impact on the entire region,” said Beat Wampfler of Käsehaus K3.

Could this experiment have actually worked? It is hard for me to believe. I have heard music volume and tempo can affect how we perceive the taste of food, but I never thought it would directly affect the actual taste of food.

While the results found that hip-hop made the cheese taste fruitier and sweeter, I think it might be a placebo and/or a coincidence that the majority of judges deemed hip-hop as the best tasting. For me to fully invest in the experiment, it will have to be conducted over a longer period of time and perhaps be tried on different types of food, not just cheese.

If the study is truly reliable and can consistently produce the same results of fruitier cheese, imagine how much better Cheez-Its and Goldfish would taste if their producers blast Childish Gambino or Eminem at their delicious snacks.