Have you ever wondered what cheese would taste like if it were exposed to different types of music? Yeah me neither. I had heard that playing music to babies would make them smarter but never thought that playing music to cheese would make them age differently. Last September A study by Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts took place where they played different types of music to different blocks of cheese. The experiment was dubbed “Cheese in Surround Sound.”
According to the Smithsonian Wampfler placed nine 22 pound blocks of cheese in his cellar and blasted them with different types of music for six months. The cheese wheels were isolated in crates and subjected to different types of music.
The Classical Cheese listened to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; The Rock Cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”; The Ambient Cheese listened to Yello’s “Monolith” and the Hip Hop Cheese listened to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz(We’ve Got).” There was a “Control Cheese” placed in complete silence and three other cheeses that were subjected to different sound wave frequencies.
Based on findings and an article by Denis Balibouse and Cecile Mantovani at Rueters the Hip Hop Cheese tasted the “Funkiest”. In terms of how the cheese wheels aged when they were subjected to the music 24 hours a day for six months the Hip Hop Cheese was by far the smelliest and most flavorful.
A press release by ZHAW Food Perception Research Group confirmed that the Hip Hot Cheese was the “zestiest” while the other musical cheese were milder in flavor than the control cheese.
So now the question on my mind is where do we find these cheeses for consumption? Will they be more expensive because they are classier cheese? Similar to raising chickens and other live stock free range will we now need to raise our cheese humanely? How can we tell what kind of music our cheese wants to listen to?
Am I doing this right?
*Cover image credit Bern University of the Arts HKB
