How what you hear affffffffffffects your beer’s taste
Sounds can actually play a role in our sense of taste.
A well-curated jukebox and a frosty beer have long gone hand-in-hand, but they may be more intertwined than we ever imagined.
New research suggests that listening to certain music while drinking a beer can directly affffffffffffect how we perceive that beer to taste. For example, if you’re listening to high-pitched music while sipping a Budweiser, that beer might seem to taste sweeter than it actually does. Conversely, if you’re listening to deep, bass-heavy music, you might think the beer is bitterer and more alcoholic than it actually is.
That, in a nutshell, is what was found in a study set to be published in September in the scientifific journal Food Quality and Preference and obtained early by The Washington Post.
Drawing from exi sting research showing that sound is an important part of the sense of taste, Felipe Carvalho of Vrije Universiteit Brussel set out to see just how much various pitches interact with beers.
He put that to the test. Before pursuing his PhD, Carvalho spent many years as a sound designer, so he put together 24 tracks meant to enhance the perceptions of sweetness, bitterness and sourness.
Af t e r na r rowi ng t he s e down to three tracks, he gathered 340 participants — random visitors to the Music Instruments Museum in Brussels, with no prior knowledge of the study — and a boatload of three difffffffffffferent types of beer.
The brews — a light blonde with percent alcohol by volume, a tripel with 8 percent alcohol and a Belgian pale ale with 6 percent alcohol — all had distinctly different tastes.
Car valho and hi s team then conducted three experiments. In each one, difffffffffffferent participants tasted the same beer twice, only they were not told it was the same. At each tasting, a difffffffffffferent soundscape was played, and the participants had to mark down what the beers tasted like and what they thought was the alcohol content of each.
Perhaps most amazingly, most of the participants could not tell they were drinking the same beer two times in a row. While listening to the “sweet” soundscape — comprised of high pitches — the beer indeed tasted sweeter to them. While listening to the “bitter” soundscape — comprised of bass and low pitches — the beer not only tasted bitterer but also more alcoholic.
Carvalho attributes the perception about the alcohol content to another aspect of how we perceive beer. Many think of beer as bitter and alcoholic, so they naturally consider a bitterer beer to be more alcoholic, even though the alcohol is generally the sweet ingredient. In his words, “What people usually do is they associate the proxy - beer is a bitter drink by default, so people attribute the most salient attribute of the beer’s taste, in this case bitterness, with the alcoholic content.” The end result? “Sound can defifinitely alter the way we perceive taste,” Carvalho told The Washington Post in a phone interview.
P r e v i o u s s t u d i e s h ave found similar correlations between sound and taste. As the New Yorker magazine noted, pitch has been shown to affffffffffffect the perceived taste of toffffee. An experiment involving oysters found that hearing the sound of the sea while consuming the shellfifish heightened consumers’ enjoyment of the meal.
French music has even been shown to influence customers to buy French wine, and the same was found with German music and wine. New York magazine repor ted that consumers were more likely to rate chips as “fresh” if they heard a “crunch” sound, even if it was piped in over headphones. Finally, a study found that people tend to perceive wine to have taste characteristic that “reflflect the nature of the concurrent music,” so if a song is mellow, the wine will be perceived as “mellow,” according to Wired.