Cheese exposed to hip-hop tastes better, finds Swiss experiment

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.

My intuition is that it's a satire of p-hacking culture

Cats' purrs cause them to heal faster. They're probably assisting their lymphatic channels in pumping to clear toxins, or somesuch.

Maybe there's a frequency of sound that does the same—on a much smaller organelle level—for the bacteria in the cheese. Maybe increases their metabolism or something, makes the cheese age faster.

The bacterial growth behavior changes by the sound that gets absorbed by the cheese .

I think there have been studies that exposing plants to sound can also alter their behavior.

Cheese is funky. Hip-hop is funky.

Science.

...and why doesn't Mozart or Led Zeppelin? Are there cheeses that prefer Led Zep? I have to stop now, this got too ridiculous.

I also tend to think it's a fluke. :)

its the sub bass

my hypothesis if anyone wants to replicate

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!

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...

It's genius marketing-- they were guaranteed a "surprising" conclusion that people widely share.

edit: The point I'm making, perhaps too tersely based on the below response, is a flawed study can be designed where every outcome would be "surprising" but obviously the rationale supporting that outcome would be poor. That people tend to share surprising outcomes (ie-- post it on Hacker News)-- makes it genius marketing.

I can see this being legit but not because of the lyrics. Hip hop has deeper bass lines which could vibrate into the cheese vs other types of music. Those vibrations could account for a change in growth of the cheese culture.

That might be interesting, actually. Has it been done? I've been an advocate for "coin flipping is not random" since I was young and could flip heads or tails on demand (about 80% accurate, but I didn't practice all that much). Caveat being I catch the coin in my hand on the way down (not letting it hit the floor) and know which side was up before flipping.

Essentially, does the beat of the song (or whatever) influence timings and force applied enough to bias the results?

This was done by an art school. It's a joke.

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?

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.

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.

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.

My eyeballs initially read your post as: "How large of a sample population did they use in their BLING tasting..." If hip-hop can exert that kind of influence over even my semi-literate brain, I ask you, what kind of a chance does cheese stand?

Critical thinking?