Fez — Pour three glasses of mint tea from the same pot. Take the first sip in silence. For the second, put on a tune you would describe as sweet. For the third, choose music with a sharper edge. Which glass tasted sweetest?
Before you settle on an answer, ask yourself which one you liked best.
University of Copenhagen researchers Alberte Baggesgaard Seeberg and Janice Wang studied 28 people tasting sweet and sour solutions while listening to specially composed music.
Listeners enjoyed taste samples more when a sweet-sounding track played than when they tasted them in silence. But when the researchers asked specifically about sweetness, the soundtrack made no significant overall difference to the scores. People could like a sip more without tasting any extra sugar.
What does sugar sound like?
The team tested two soundtracks composed to suggest sweetness or sourness.
Participants listened to them while tasting water mixed with sugar, citric acid, or different proportions of the two. Most of us know what it means to call a melody sweet. The experiment gave that familiar expression a literal test: could listeners pick the drink that went with the music?
They could. Sugar water seemed a better match for the sweet track, and citric acid for the sour one.
Even the proportions mattered. As the balance tipped toward sugar, listeners favored the sweeter musical pairing.
An equal mixture went about equally well with either track. Brain scans also showed that some regions responded more strongly when people heard music while tasting a solution than when they tasted it alone.
The study appeared on June 11, and the University of Copenhagen highlighted it on October 22.
Give the teapot the last word
The researchers used simple solutions. Moroccan mint tea brings more to the glass: the smell of mint, the bitterness of the tea, the heat of the pour. What music does to that combination is an open question, and an easy one to try with a friend.
Give each person three equal pours at about the same temperature. Let someone else choose the music and keep the track labels to themselves. Change the order for the second taster. After each sip, write down two scores, one for sweetness and one for pleasure, before anyone compares answers.
Then put the scores aside and see which glass each person reaches for. That last choice might tell you more about what to play with the next pot than the sweetness score does.