Can music make food taste better? | Hacker News Reader

Can music make food taste better?

atlasobscura.com

59 pointscainxinth25 comments

Related: a bottle of Nier: Automata wine that was aged in a barrel while listening to the Nier: Automata OST:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/this-nier-automata-wine-ha...

Please give me something the opposite way around. I'd like food to taste worse, so I'll eat the bare minimum, and never run the risk of overindulging. Ideally, I'd like food to taste a little better than medicine.

Sure, https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

Looking forward to your results

This is easy, just eat boiled potatoes, meat and veg

Give Nickelback a try.

From the movie 1992 "Singles" where one of the main characters is working on the traffic problem:

"Single people get in their cars every morning. They drive and wonder why there's gridlock. This is what I've been working on. If you had a supertrain...you give people a reason to get out of their cars. Coffee, great music...they will park and ride. I know they will."

"But I still love my car, though."

I always thought it was interesting he thought by giving people good coffee mixed with great music, people would be more inclined to ride public transportation.

That was when people went to independent coffeehouses to hang out, talk, listen to music, read books, etc., not to plug in their laptops or work. The third place hadn't yet morphed into a shared office space.

Of course, not everyone likes the same music. Listening to music in my car means I don't have to annoy everyone else who doesn't like it.

Back in the day music wasn't an isolationist experience, nor socializing was shunned for fear of breaking off one's echo bubble and, oh the humanity!, having to listen outside one's playlist

I've always wanted to start a company that does thoughtful sound design for restaurants using some of these research findings. 90% of restaurant sound is just an awful afterthought.

Hey if you do this, and engineer individual control within a seating area, please also add "off", for those thst generally prefer no noise, to music.

The sound is not just about taste in restaurants.

Fine dining sounds different from your hipster brewery, which sounds different from your mall food court, and often is tailored to produce a class/experience-appropriate aesthetic.

There is also the whole “authenticity” thing where manufactured sound may make an establishment feel like a cheap theme park if you’re not careful.

On a related note (la), if this floats your ice cream, you might be interested in Ben Houge's Food Opera sound/dining experiments (http://www.audiogustatory.com/).

I took part in a test where they gave me three drinks which I tasted while listening to three different songs. In the end they told me all drinks were the same and I was very surprised! Pop music made it taste sweeter.

Fat Duck had a dish "sounds of the ocean" which was served with headphones. Pretty gimmicky but yeah, I totally believe in the power of the placebo.

WHAT‽ I can't taste my food over the music in here!

I'd pretty sure certain restaurants and bars bump up the volume purely so patrons cannot have a conversation and can only focus on eating and drinking.

I don't think you're wrong.

https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/bay-area-restaurants-sen...

Most of my restaurant trips are to enjoy a meal with friends or family, and talk. I wonder the logic.

Also the modern restaurant/bar interior is all tile and other hard surfaces: very noisy. This is partly for sanitary reasons but also to encourage people to eat and get out.

it turns out that rising real estate costs hit everybody and now everyone is trying to optimize every last dollar to make rent.

Encourages me to get out and not come back. I don't return to noisy places.

wow, just found out about this via my this children's science podcast I listen to with my son: https://tinkercast.com/podcasts/wow-in-the-world/drop-that-b...

Interesting, this effect sounds very similar to how the words used to describe wine cause you to taste those notes.

Yes.

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