Hardcore music has a use
News outlets around the world and locally are reporting on a study that found loud music made alcohol taste sweeter. The research participants drank various concentrations of cranberry & vodka while listening to nothing, loud annoying music, a news track that they had to repeat back, or both the music and the news.
People who listened to the music rated the drinks as sweeter. The researchers suggest this explains why people drink more in clubs. I think they’re missing an important point. The sweetness of alcoholic drinks is under the control of the manufacturer and the drinker, and there’s no reason to think that people in quiet settings deliberately choose drinks that are less sweet than they would prefer. If the noise effect is strong enough to be meaningful in practice, it should just mean that people choose less sweet drinks when it’s loud and sweeter ones when it’s quiet — the same way that people allegedly drink more tomato juice on aeroplanes because taste sensations are different at altitude.
The researchers also found that the combination of the music and the news task “was accompanied by increased negative mood”, so if you need to take dictation, choose a bar that plays country and western, not hardcore.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Hmm, people drink more tomato juice on aeroplanes because taste sensations are different at altitude? I’d like to see the investigation that found that.
If people already have established tastes, and they don’t like tomato juice, one would imagine that even if they may like tomato juice more when in-flight, they obviously wouldn’t know this and therefore wouldn’t want tomato juice on a plane any more than they’d want it on land. The same goes for the reverse.
If more tomato juice is consumed proportionally on an aeroplane than on land, would it not be logical to assume that this is because there is less choice of what to drink on an aeroplane?
Like I said, I wasn’t privy to the original study so if I have missed a point (possibly interpreting “taste sensations” incorrectly as “taste preferences after/during consumption” rather than “cravings before consumption) a polite follow up comment pointing me in the right direction would be most helpful
12 years ago
I did say ‘allegedly’, because I haven’t seen detailed data, but it does seem to be the case that tomato juice is more popular on planes (relative to the other drinks they carry, which is a meaningful comparison) and that taste sensations are different at low air pressure . (not just preferences)
Since a lot of taste information is carried by smell, it’s not that weird.
The study doesn’t seem to be published (or at least not published in English).
12 years ago