The Point of the Bar Jukebox: Music can affect the taste of beer.

Imagine walking into your local pub.

Happy Hour specials are still happening and your favorite bartender is wielding a shaker. You take a seat at the bar and you turn to your friend before you order a beer to say, “I love this song.” It’s a nice image, right? The real question is, how much are you planning on paying for the brew? Maybe more than you think.

[Image source: http://rdirishpub.com/]

A recent study by researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium demonstrated that the experience of beer tasting isn’t as objective as simply examining the different flavor notes of a given beer and that accompanying music can significantly change the way we perceive the taste of beer. It can even affect how much we are willing to pay (1).

There’s a few components to consider when looking at this effect.

First, it’s well-established that there is a multisensory nature to tasting (2). Music, as well as other senses, can affect the way we experience food. People enjoy their food more when they’re listening to jazz as opposed to hip hop when they eat it (3). When quiet music is playing, people are more likely to make healthier food choices than they do when listening to loud music or silence (4). People even associate different pitches with different flavors. High pitches remind people of sour food, and low pitches sound bitter (5).

Interestingly, some of these effects are only noted in “emotional” food, such as chocolate, as opposed to “non-emotional” food, like bell peppers (3). Far be it from me to judge what someone munches on when they’re emotional, but the discrepancy stands.

Another thing to note, there are multiple parts to the subjective experience of taste. First, there’s a hedonistic component. That’s how much pleasure is associated with the experience of taste and it’s conceptually separate from the actual flavor notes that we can distinguish on our palette. Then, there are the flavors that we perceive, like sweet, bitter and salty. It’s important to distinguish these because where pleasure is understood to be subjective, flavor is supposed to be objective. Candy is sweet, spinach is bitter, bread is… well, bready. Right? Eh, not so much. The following study supports the broader idea that our perception isn’t really so reliable. Think along the same lines of faulty eyewitness testimonies, blind taste tests, and Gestalt illusions. Our brains are pretty easy to trick, especially when emotion is involved.

That’s why these researchers chose the beer-tasting music in the study based on how it made people feel. After all, who gets to decide what music is universally positive or negative? Four songs were tested, two of which were initially predicted to evoke a positive emotional response from listeners and the other two, well, not so much. The emotional framing of the music selection is what makes this study the first of its kind. There have been other studies that determined music could affect, say, how people experienced the taste of certain wines (6) and beers (7).

The two positive songs were Chopin’s “Nocturne Op. 9 №2”, a sweet classical piece, and “Porro Sabanero” by Lucho Bermudez, a rich, fast, folkloric Columbian tune. The negative pieces were “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber and “Mors Praematura” by Jessica Curry. The former is allegedly one of the most universally depressing (8) pieces of music (and you thought “Mad World” by Gary Jules was sad). The second is part of the soundtrack to a horror-indie video game called “Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.” If you couldn’t tell, it’s not a pleasant track. The songs were played for participants for about a minute each and participants were then asked to answer twenty questions about how the music made them feel.

Unsurprisingly, people felt pretty good after listening to Chopin and Bermudez pieces. The Curry song was rated as making participants feel emotionally negative and the Barber piece ended up as a kind of wildcard. While the song might be considered objectively sad, that might be different from a negative emotional response by the listener, because people still gave it more positive ratings than negative. Thus, it was eliminated from the experiment.

Moving forward with the three songs that made participants feel solidly positive or negative, the next experiment aimed to figure out what makes beer taste better: tasting it in silence or while listening to music? Participants were given two small samples of Zinnebir, a bitter-dry pale lager produced by a small Belgian brewery. They drank one sample while listening to music (either the Chopin or the Curry) and one while listening in silence. They weren’t told it was the same beer but they were asked to rate it on its sweetness, bitterness, sourness, alcohol strength, body, and how much they liked it. The only significantly different rating was “body.” Participants rated the beer as having more body when they heard music as they were tasting it.

Let’s pause here to talk about body. Could you explain articulately what the “body” of a beer means? Probably not. “Body” is a pretty nuanced flavor of beer and typically less experienced beer drinkers don’t really know what they mean by body. It’s possible that tasters didn’t really know what was “different” about the two beers, they just knew there was something that tasted different between the two beers which contained identical ingredients.

Things get more interesting when the positive and negative music were directly pitted up against each other. In the first experiment, tasters heard positive or negative music, not both. Next, the experimenters looked at what happens when a person hears one after the other when tasting the beer two times. As predicted, this direct comparison yielded a much larger effect: tasters rated the beer, this time a popular Belgian lager called Jupiler, as sweeter, less bitter, having less alcohol, and being of weaker body when they listened to positive music. They also liked it more and were willing to pay, on average, €0.29 more euros, or $0.32 dollars, for the “sweeter” beer. These results were tested again with a stronger, darker ale called Chimay Blue and the same effects were found.

But why does this matter? I’m glad you asked, Fellow Beer Lover. First off, it has some implications for marketing. If a Bud Light commercial is put to Chopin, am I more likely to buy it? Maybe not, though further research is needed. But if my local bar plays only Sam Cooke? It’s possible I’d shell out a little more for the Goose Island, especially if Napalm Death was playing just a moment earlier. The effects of music on hedonistic experience as well as perceived taste are harder to study in a real-world commercial setting, so it’s difficult to know how it would actually change consumer activity, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put on “California” by Joni Mitchell and see if your Blue Moon tastes just a little bit better than usual.

Works Cited

1. Reinoso-Carvalho, F., Dakduk, S., Wagemans, J., & Spence, C. (2019). Not Just Another Pint! The Role of Emotion Induced by Music on the Consumer’s Tasting Experience. Multisensory Research, 32(4–5), 367–400. doi: 10.1163/22134808–20191374
2. Auvray, M. and Spence, C. (2008). The multisensory perception of flavor. Conscious. Cogn. 17, 1016–1031.
3. Fiegel, A., Meullenet, J.-F., Harrington, R. J., Humble, R. and Seo, H.-S. (2014). Background music genre can modulate flavor pleasantness and overall impression of food stimuli, Appetite 76, 144–152.
4. Biswas, D., Lund, K. and Szocs, C. (2019). Sounds like a healthy retail atmospheric strategy: effects of ambient music and background noise on food sales, J. Acad. Mark. Sci. 47, 37–55.
5. Crisinel, A.-S. and Spence, C. (2009). Implicit association between basic tastes and pitch, Neurosci Lett. 464, 39–42.
6. North, A. C. (2012). The effect of background music on the taste of wine. Bn J. Psychol. 103, 293–301.
7. Reinoso Carvalho, F., Velasco, C., van Ee, R., Leboeuf, Y. and Spence, C. (2016c). Music influences hedonic and taste ratings in beer, Front. Psychol. 7, 636. DOI:10.3389/fpsyg. 2016.00636.
8. Huron, D. (2007). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.