What music makes the best cheese? Hip-hop!
Is cheese sensitive to music? Turns out the answer is yes, and the kind of music that creates the most flavorful cheese is hip-hop–and specifically, A Tribe Called Quest! Christian Raaflaub of Swiss Info explains:
A quirky experiment that exposed Swiss cheese to different kinds of music found that hip-hop made it taste the best.
Eight wheels of “Muttenglück” Emmental cheese from World Cheese Championship winner Antony Wyss were subjected separately to different musical stimulus—including Mozart, A Tribe Called Quest, Yello, Led Zeppelin, techno and three sinusoidal sounds—round-the-clock for eight months.
The experiment was part of a collaboration between students of the University of Arts Bern and veterinarian Beat Wampfler who came up with the idea. The project was baptised “Cheese in Surround Sound—a culinary art experiment”.
A blind tasting test eight months later found that the wheel exposed to hip-hop had the most unique taste profile.
For more info, here’s a great blog entry by Jeri Case about the experiment, which includes lots of photos of the cheese and of the folks who ran the experiment. The blog also provides more detail about the music that was played for the cheese:
In August, Harenberg and his students set up a controlled experiment with 9 separate boxes with 8 different kinds of music piped into them (listed below) and one box with no music.
1. No sound (reference box)
2. Ambient: Yello – ‘Monolith’
3. Classical: W.A. Mozart – ‘The Magic Flute’
4. Techno: Vril – ‘UV’
5. Rock: Led Zeppelin – ‘Stairway to Heaven’
6. Medium frequency: 200 kHz
7. High frequency: 1000 kHz
8. Hip hop: A Tribe Called Quest – ‘We Got (the Jazz)’
9. Low frequency: 25 kHz
Finally, here’s a 2-minute video demonstrating the process, from AFP News Agency, which explains:
When searching a fromagerie for the perfect chunk of cheddar or parmesan, cheese aficionados have probably never grilled vendors over what kind of music was…
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