New York, To woo your lady, make sure to play right music along with serving her favourite cuisines as the influence of background music on food perception has now been unlocked.
According to a new study on the effects of different background music on the taste of foods, genres of music can elicit different emotions and the enjoyment of some foods can be affected by emotions.
“Little has been known about the influence of background music genre on food perception so far as most studies focused on eating and shopping behaviours,” said Han-Seok Seo from University of Arkansas in the US.
In this experiment, 99 participants sampled a 'comfort' food milk chocolate - one that is associated with emotions - versus a food that is not like bell pepper - while listening to the same piece of music which had been re-composed as classical, jazz, hip-hop and rock.
They discovered that jazz made the chocolate taste measurably better and hip hop did not.
The same effect was not seen on the bell peppers, said the research published in the journal Appetite.
The study showed that background music genre can modulate flavour pleasantness and overall acceptability of chocolate.
“The acoustic environment plays a big role. It let's us eat faster, leaves us hungrier, changes the pleasantness of foods and turns regular food into something special,” explained Thomas Hummel of Technische Universitat in Dresden, Germany.
