Music indeed impacts flavor, smell and taste of cheese, proves study. Hip-hop gives the best result

It is no secret that music has the crazy ability to change anyone's mood in a matter of seconds. As per Reuters, this impact is not limited to moods only but also includes cheese. A study conducted in Switzerland provides positive indications that cheese changes taste according to the music they have been subjected to during its making. This assertion has been made after the opinion of tasters who, to their surprise, actually noted a difference in every genre's cheese. Though it might be hard for humanity to conclude which genre of music is the best, the community of cheese seems to have no issue in this department. 

Even though good-quality cheese might melt into people's mouths in seconds, the process of making it is not exactly the easiest. There are several steps involved, like acidifying, curdling, processing, salting and aging. It is a delicate dance between milk and bacteria, and as per Swiss Info (SWI), a study named "Cheese in Surround Sound – a culinary art experiment" has proved that the music accompanying the dance makes a ton of difference. In order to conduct this study, nine wheels of Emmental cheese weighing 10 kilos (22 pounds) were arranged. For eight months, they were placed in separate wooden crates. They were then subjected to music 24 hours a day. The chosen songs ranged from "A Tribe Called Quest's" hip hop track "We Got It From Here," Mozart's "Magic Flute" opera, or Led Zeppelin's rock classic "Stairway to Heaven."

Vril's "UV" and another dark ambient piece, "Monolith," were also popular choices to get the bacteria into the groove. To make the stakes a bit more interesting, three specimens were just subjected to low, medium and high frequencies and another one was listening to the sound of silence. The moment of truth came during the tasting. "The most obvious differences were observed in the strength of flavor, smell, and taste," researchers from the Bern University of Arts said in reporting the findings of a culinary jury that that was part of blind tasting panel. "The hip hop sample topped the list of all cheese exposed to music in terms of fruitiness...(it) was the strongest of these in terms of smell and taste."

There it is, cheese has given its verdict, "hip hop" tops its popular music chart. One of the jury members involved in the tasting, Benjamin Luzuy, said about the decision, "The differences were very clear, in terms of texture, taste, the appearance, there was really something very different." The study ensured that the sounds used did not give way to noise pollution. The team employed mini transmitters rather than other instruments to produce sound. "All the energy is directly resonating inside of the cheese," Michael Harenberg of Bern University of Arts said.

Cheesemaker and veterinarian Beat Wampfler, who got the whole project up and running, mentioned it wasn't an easy path for hip hop to become the king of cheese music. There were two rounds of tasting to determine the numero uno choice. But both times, hip-hop was the clear winner. He shared that the hip-hop cheese was "remarkably fruity, both in smell and taste and significantly different from the other samples." After the results, the study will now focus solely on hip-hop and its impact on cheese. He said, "The idea is now to take 5 or 10 cheeses and put hip-hop on them and then compare."

In a conversation with SWI, a Swiss public broadcast service, Wampfler said he always believed this theory but just needed to prove it. "Bacteria are not dormant beings that only reproduce once they have got a substrate. So, why shouldn't they also be influenced by music, by physics or by sound waves? For me, that part was obvious but the fact that such a simple relatively straightforward experiment could show these effects did quite surprise me," he said, which was roughly translated to this in English.