Does Hip Hop Music Really Makes Aging Cheese Taste Better?

Even though “older” music critics who are paid to do reviews might classify hip-hop and electronic dance music as “cheesy”, but does playing hip hop music to cheese as it ages really make them taste better?

By: Ringo Bones

When I read about a recently conducted experiment whose results show that hip-hop music actually makes cheese taste better, memories of anecdotes that dates back from the 1970s about saxophone-based Jazz music are supposedly good for flowering plants spring to mind. But given that the news story about some types of music supposedly makes cheese taste better was published in a number of reputable news outlets, my “musical curiosity” immediately got the better of me. The news states that a recent experiment conducted in Switzerland called Cheese in Surround Sound has found out that exposing aging cheese to certain types of music makes it taste better.

The study was put together in order to investigate how the microorganisms that give cheese its flavor might react to various types of sound waves. During the experiment, nine identical 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese were placed in individual wooden crates and exposed to five different genres of music and three different sine wave frequencies (high, mid, low) for 24 hours a day over six months. One of the cheese was designated as a control cheese – depriving it of music altogether.

Each wheel of cheese was assigned a song that would play on a loop for 24-hours during the maturation process. Some of the music tracks used included W.A. Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven and A Tribe Called Quest’s Jazz (We’ve Got). There was also a Techno wheel of cheese that was subjected to Vril’s 2011 track UV off the Ostgut Ton compilation Berghain 05.

After the duration of the musical listening sessions, these so-called acoustic cheese wheels were then subjected to taste tests by food technologists from the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences. In their findings, these food technologists that the “cheeses exposed to music has a generally mild flavor compared to the control test sample”. The taste testers also concluded that the wheel of cheese exposed to six straight months of the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest had “a distinctly stronger smell and stronger, fruitier taste than the other test samples”. These amazing results show us how the bio-acoustic impact of sound waves affect the metabolic processes of bacteria responsible in cheese making. Which makes me wonder if those 1970s era experiments of various genres of music being studied on their effects of the growth of garden plants really do have scientific merit.

In further taste tests, the music exposed cheeses were presented to a panel of highly qualified culinary jurors in a blind taste test, all of whom noticeably favored the Emmental cheese that was exposed to the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. The culinary panel also found that the cheeses that were exposed to low-frequency sound waves were sweeter than the rest. But during a chat with NPR, cheese enthusiast and experiment organizer Beat Wampfler states that there was “not such a big difference” between Rock ‘n’ Roll cheese and the Techno music cheese. Maybe the Swiss scientists should try exposing a new cheese batch to Primus’ Sailing The Seas of Cheese album.