
Cheese exposed to hip-hop tastes better, finds Swiss experiment - T-A
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sonochemistry_cheese-exposed-to-hip-hop-tastes-better--finds-swiss-experiment/44824418
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lph
Wow! Yesterday we learned about what happens when dead alligators are dropped
to the sea floor of the abyssal plane (a giant isopod smorgasbord), and today
we learn about cheese exposed to hip hop. The 2019 IgNobel competition is
really heating up.

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jonny_eh
Shows how unreliable experiments like this are. Needs some Bayesian analysis.

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korethr
My intuition is that this is a fluke that will fail to replicate.

If it however, _does_ replicate, consistently, that opens up a bunch of
questions. Just _how_ does hip-hop make cheese sound better?

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eridius
No worries about that, they didn't even plicate it to begin with. They exposed
8 wheels of cheese to 8 different types of music. This study was absolutely
guaranteed to find that _one_ of them "tastes better", given that if you
tasted 8 wheels of cheese without the music, one of them would have tasted the
best.

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joshvm
There was a control cheese, at least.

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eridius
True, so they could have also determined "Music makes your cheese taste
worse".

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maemilius
This brings a whole new meaning to culturing cheese.

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spinach
Would the cheese taste even better if you let the cheese stay at art museums?
Wait for part 2 of the experiment where we find what art museum makes cheese
taste the best!

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harpastum
Try this thought experiment: play eight songs from different genres of music,
flipping a coin 5 times for each song. Whichever song had the most heads must
make you more likely to flip heads.

How is this study different from that?

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JorgeGT
It is not. If they had 10 cheeses exposed to hip-hop, 10 to classical, 10
controls, etc., and the differences in rating where statistically significant
they would be onto something. But per the study factsheet, they used just one
box per music type so it is exactly as you say, one box just tasted better but
it could be for any number of reasons:
[https://hkbgehtanland.ch/assets/pdf/20181129_hkb_cheese-
in-s...](https://hkbgehtanland.ch/assets/pdf/20181129_hkb_cheese-in-surround-
sound_factsheet.pdf)

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temporalparts
I feel like this experiment, like Swiss cheese, is filled with holes.

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liamcardenas
Wow that joke was very cheesy

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jonny_eh
I dunno, I thought it was pretty gouda

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matt-snider
Works as long as you're not one of those people who pronounce it "gao-da"

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isostatic
Very disappointed that the winning genre wasn’t cheese.

Some S Club 7 will make your Brie far better.

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masonic
"I gotta stack cheese. _I gotta stack cheese!_ "

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TRhoE5Cf3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TRhoE5Cf3k)

Some may recognize this song from its use in an Avis commercial a few years
ago:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPw35jQUGt8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPw35jQUGt8)

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ggm
Resonant frequency of the holes? /S

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benj111
Don't know why you added the /s tag, its as good a theory as any other.

And will be proved when the experiment is repeated (with different hole
structure), and cheese is found to taste better when exposed to some other
music genre.

Can I borrow your /s tag?

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ggm
IPR registration pending... (/s)

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duado
Is this a satire, or is there something about low frequency audio that
physically changes the cheese?

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robdachshund
It's not satire nor a real experiment. There is no evidence to take from this.
The box the cheese was placed in was a variable as well, so there's no
conclusions to take here.

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comradesmith
Surely the article is midtoane when it used the unit kHz for the frequencies,
the sine waves used were

> Low frequency: 25kHz

> Medium frequency: 200kHz

> High frequency: 1000 kHz

All of which are very high and well above the range of human hearing, so I
think the units should be Hz instead.

Do we have a paper source for this?

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seba_dos1
Some young people may just reach that "low" range and be able to catch the
unpleasant existence of a 25kHz sound source :) I was able to hear it when I
was circa 13yo IIRC. But yeah, for an adult, that would be truly exceptional.

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Firerouge
How large of a sample population did they use in their blind tasting, I can't
find the original publication source, but I imagine a whole cheese wheel could
be cut into quite a lot of little chunks.

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harpastum
I don't think the sample population is the largest issue here. The issue is
that they didn't control for _any_ other factors.

It's entirely likely that the hip-hop cheese _was_ better, but for reasons
completely unrelated to the music. Without replication this is extremely
likely to be random chance.

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rwnspace
But how long did they expose it to Roquefort?

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bitwize
I smell an IgNobel Prize in the offing... or is that just the Jay-Z-infused
limburger?

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booleandilemma
Is it a coincidence that Jay-Z is always going on about cheddar and spending
cheese?

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polymeris
I am more curious how they managed to output a 1000 kHz tone through those
speakers.

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jdreyfuss
Maybe it was the Electric Relaxation that did it

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adamnemecek
Sounds like a way to promote something.

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iiv
Critical thinking?

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notacoward
It's because of the phat content.

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_lessthan0
Is this valuable time for researchers

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Baeocystin
I am disappointed that the result was not titled Moo Bitch Get Out Da Whey.

Still, an amusing art project. And I actually would be kind of interested in
seeing it done as an actual experiment. Sound waves have a significant effect
on plant growth, after all.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209531191...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209531191360492X)

