Cheese is one of life’s gifts that somehow manages to be delicious while also making absolutely no sense in almost any context. It’s made from stuff you get from the bottom of a cow, it tastes better the older and mouldier it is, and there are festivals around the world dedicated to this curdled dairy product.
But it appears that there’s more to cheese than being just delicious.
Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler recently decided to conduct a experiment to test if soundwaves impacts the development of cheese. In other words, he played a bunch of Led Zeppelin, hip-hop, and other genres of music to a heap of cheese wheels like how a mother plays Mozart to her baby.
Yes, he also played Mozart to his cheese.
And here’s the craziest thing: the experiment yielded an actual result.
This guy may be onto something.
After months of subjecting nine 10kg wheels of Emmental cheese to a variety of music genres and sound waves of varying frequencies for 24 hours a day via mini transmitters, Wampfler finally presented the results (via Reuters) and declared that the cheese differed in flavour, smell, and taste depending on the type of music it was exposed to.
For those curious, the music used in the experiment included:
- A Tribe Called Quest’s hip-hop track “We Got It From Here”
- Mozart’s “Magic Flute” opera
- Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”
- Yello’s “Monolith”
- Vril’s “UV”
- And sound waves at 25, 200, and 1000 kHz
After two blind taste tests were conducted on the experimented cheese, it was concluded that the wheel exposed to hip-hop had the biggest change in its taste profile.
Praising the bacteria in the cheese for doing a “good job”, Wampfler said that the hip-hop exposed cheese was “remarkably fruity, both in smell and taste, and significantly different from the other samples.”
Huh. Who would’ve thought that a wheel of cheese would have such good taste in music?
Michael Harenberg of Bern University of Arts, which provided scientific support to the experiment, was one of the many who were pleasantly surprised at how sound waves could impact a cheese’s development by that much and revealed that he’s been inundated with interviews regarding the hip-hop loving cheese.
Unsurprisingly, Wampfler isn’t stopping there and he plans on continuing the experiment by exposing more cheese to hip-hop and seeing what happens.
This is 100% the type of scientific experiment we need right now and it has my full support, mainly because I’m curious at what a cheese exposed to the Hamilton soundtrack would taste like.