Can Music Make Cheese Taste Better?
- The Editors at Very Cool Facts
- Mar 31
- 1 min read
What happens when you play hip-hop to cheese? A Swiss lab has answers.
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Can Sound Affect Your Taste Buds?
A Swiss cheesemaker named Beat Wampfler teamed up with researchers at the Bern University of the Arts to find out. They placed nine wheels of Emmental cheese in wooden crates.
Each was exposed to a different genre of music for six months—Mozart, Led Zeppelin, ambient electronica, hip-hop, and more. One cheese wheel was left in silence as the control.
The Winner: Hip-Hop Cheese
Each cheese “listened” to music for 24 hours a day using transmitters that delivered sound frequencies directly into the wheels. And the result? When blind taste testers sampled the cheeses, the hip-hop cheese—exposed to A Tribe Called Quest—was the clear favorite. It had a “stronger aroma and more complex flavor” than the others. The cheese aged in silence? Not as impressive.
Mozart or Metal? Your Choice
Cheese exposed to classical music—specifically Mozart—was described by taste testers as smoother and milder in flavor.
While it didn’t pack the same punch as the hip-hop cheese, it still developed a distinct character, suggesting that even refined sound waves can subtly shape the aging process.
Mozart for mellow, hip-hop for bold—your cheese might be more cultured than you.
To learn more about how music influences the world around us you can read more about it here.
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