Cheesy music: Swiss experiment with sound to make cheese tastier
When searching a fromagerie for the perfect chunk of cheddar or parmesan, cheese aficionados have probably never grilled vendors over what kind of music was played to their cheeses.
To many, the question itself might sound crackers, AFP wrote.
But a Swiss cheesemaker has embarked on an experiment to test the impact of music on Emmental, one of the most famous cheeses in Switzerland, even if it prompts pundits to write such grating remarks as: You gouda brie kidding!
Marching through his 19th century cellar in Burgdorf, a town also known as Berthoud, on the edge of the Emmental region in central Switzerland, Beat Wampfler shows off hundreds of perfectly formed circles of the holey classic maturing in neat rows.
A veterinarian by day but consummate apronwearing cheese enthusiast at night, Wampfler’s love for Emmental has aged well over the years like the finest stock he cultivates.
In one corner of his impeccably clean cellar, nine open wooden crates sit with wheels of Emmental inside and small music speakers directly below.
Since September, the cheeses have each been blasted with sonic masterpieces from the likes of rock gods Led Zeppelin to hip hop legends A Tribe Called Quest.
The project — ‘Sonic cheese: experience between sound and gastronomy’ — hopes to show that the power of music can influence the development, characteristics and even flavor of the cheese.
Mozart or flamenco?
“Bacteria is responsible for the formation of the taste of cheese, with the enzymes that influence its maturity. I am convinced that humidity, temperature or nutrients are not the only things that influence taste,” Wampfler told AFP.
“Sounds, ultrasounds or music can also have physical effects,” he insisted.
The thought of playing rock ‘n’ roll music to influence the flavor of cheese may make some scientists cringe.
But parts of the scientific community have spent years analyzing the effect of sound on plants, and some mums-to-be believe playing classical music to their unborn child makes them smarter.
Music can create feelings, reaching inside people and stirring their senses into a fondue of emotions, in ways that can make people smile, cry or jump in elation.
Is potentially testing whether Roquefort is a fan of hard rock or Queso a follower of flamenco really so completely far-fetched?
The University of the Arts in Bern does not think so and is helping Wampfler conduct the experiment.
“At first we were skeptical,” admitted Michael Harenberg, the university’s music director.
“Then we discovered there is a field called sonochemistry that looks at the influences of sound waves, the effect of sound on solid bodies.”
Hoping for hip-hop
Scientists have experimented with sonochemistry, in particular looking into how ultrasound can affect chemical reactions.
With Wampfler’s refined cheeses, the pungent sounds played to them also include techno beats, ambient choirs and Mozart’s classic Magic Flute.
“We are trying to... answer the question: in the end is there anything measurable? Or something that has an effect on the taste?” Harenberg said.
Students at the university are helping to conduct the project as part of a program launched last year to bring communities in the region together — in this case agriculture and the arts.
“At first we were a bit scared,” laughed program director Christian Pauli.
“We never thought we would find ourselves one day in a cellar in Burgdorf concerned about cheese,” he said.
For now, the Emmentals age alongside their respective music genres, maturing their potent flavors in potentially alternative sonic-induced ways, awaiting tasting in the new year.
“Will the cheese taste better? It’s hard to say,” Wampfler said.
Mulling over the different music styles, he couldn’t predict a winner but had a favorite: “I hope that the hip-hop cheese will be the best.”
A jury of expert cheese tasters will assess whether there is a hole in this Swiss cheese experiment on March 14. Ghost words have nothing to do with otherworldly apparitions, but they’re enough to scare the headwords off lexicographers.
Coined by philologist Walter William Skeat in 1886, ghost words are often the result of misreading and typographical errors. But not all misread and mistyped words are so spooky. While some that have meandered from their original forms have mostly retained their original meanings, according to mentallfloss.com.
The meaning of ghost words, and by extension the words themselves, never existed, except, as Skeat said, “In the perfervid imagination of ignorant or blundering editors.”
Another kind of fake word is the Nihilartikel, which translates from Latin and German as ‘nothing article’.
Nihilartikels are deliberately phony words included to ward off would-be plagiarists. In other words, you know your dictionary content has been stolen if it includes a word that exists only in your dictionary.
Here are seven fake words that ended up in Webster’s, Oxford, and the like.
1. Dord
‘Dord’ is perhaps the most famous of the ghost words.
First appearing in the 1934 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, ‘dord’ was said to mean ‘density.’
The phantom phrase hung out until 1939, when an editor finally noticed its lack of etymology. Spooked, he checked the files and found the original slip: ‘D or d, cont/ density,’ which was actually referring to abbreviations using the letter D.
At the time, words to be entered in the dictionary were typed with spaces between letters so ‘d or d’ might have been interpreted as ‘d o r d’.
Despite having proved its non-existence, it would take until 1947 before Webster’s pages were dord-free.
2. Abacot
‘Abacot’ made its debut in the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, edited by Abraham Fleming and published in 1587. It then found its way into Spelman’s Glossarium (1664), and every major dictionary since.
Almost 300 years later, James Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), discovered that the wordy wraith was actually a misprint of ‘bycoket’, a cap or head-dress.
By then, ‘abacot’ had taken on a life of its own, referring to not just any cap but a ‘cap of state, made like a double crown, worn anciently by the kings of England.’
3. Morse
The word was thought to be ‘excellent Lowland Scotch,’ and perhaps meant ‘to prime,’ as in the priming of a musket.
Another guess was that it came from the Latin ‘mordere’ meaning ‘to bite,’ and thus meant ‘to indulge in biting, stinging, or gnawing thoughts of slaughter.’
In actuality, ‘morse’ was merely a misinterpretation of the far less exciting nurse meaning to nurture or care for.
4. Phantomnation
A ghostly word in more than one way, ‘phantomnation’ was defined by Webster’s 1864 American Dictionary of the English Language as an ‘appearance as of a phantom; illusion,’ and was attributed to Alexander Pope’s translation of The Odyssey: These solemn vows and holy offerings paid to all the ‘phantomnations’ of the dead.
The real word? The no less creepy phantom-nation, a society of specters. We can blame scholar Richard Paul Jodrell for this gaffe, who, in his book The Philology of the English Language, left out hyphens in compound words.
5. Momblishness
As the OED puts it, ‘momblishness’ is explained as: ‘muttering talk’, not surprising with its similarity to the word mumble.
While this linguistic bogey was discovered to be a ‘scribal error’ of the plural of ne-moubliemie, French for the forget-menot flower, we think this is one ghost word that should be brought back from the dead.
6. Cairbow
The curious ‘cairbow’ was mentioned in an early 20th century proof of the OED in an example sentence of ‘glare’: “It [the cairbow] then suddenly squats upon its haunches, and slides along the glare-ice.” ‘Cairbow’? No one had heard of such a thing. Was it some kind of polar creature with an affinity for ice? Did it have a big rainbow on its back? Nope. ‘Cairbow’ was merely a misreading of caribou.
7. Esquivalience
The one faker by design, this spurious term, meaning ‘the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities’, materialized in the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD). Its fraudulence was revealed in the New Yorker.
According to the magazine, an ‘independent investigator’ who had heard rumors that there was a fictitious entry under the letter E in the NOAD did some research and guesswork and narrowed down the options.
After the investigator sent a list of six possibilities to a group of nine experts, seven identified ‘esquivalience’ as the fake. A call to NOAD’S then-editor-in-chief, Erin Mckean, confirmed it.
Mckean said that another editor, Christine Lindberg, had invented the word, and added that esquivalience’s “inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious”. Not obvious enough for some: The charlatan ended up in Dictionary.com, which cited Webster’s New Millennium as its source.
‘Esquivalience’ is gone now from the online reference as well as the NOAD, but as with all ghost words, its semantic spirit still remains.