With the Right Music, Your Favourite Drink Can Taste Even Better

Earlier this year he organized a series of beer & music pairing events to demonstrate how sound influences flavour. His aim is to prove how our senses overlap with each other and how what you're listening to can affect your perception of what you're eating and drinking. One of the pairings served was hoppy Belgian Duvel with the sounds of Debaser by alternative rock group The Pixies.



How does it work?
"Different styles of music and sounds match or map onto the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. You can play four bits of music and say there's one for each taste and most people will agree which ones match up, but without really knowing why. So from that, I take particular style of beer and say that this will go better with a certain style of music because this one's more bitter or acidic or this one's sour, so this is music that goes with those flavours. It's kind of a neurogastronomy," explains Pete Brown.

Experiments on how our senses match up have also been made at the Oxford University's Experimental Psychology department and proved that there is something to it. They found out, for instance, that listening to different audio frequencies does indeed alter how we rate the sweetness of food. Based on their findings, they even worked with celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal for one of the dishes for his famous Fat Duck restaurant.

Now we wonder: Does this mean that pairing our favourite Whisky with the right tune will make it even more fantastic? Definitely worth trying.

This is edited excerpt of the article from Huffington Post UK.