When Karen Walker and Mikhail Gherman walk into a new restaurant, they listen for the sound of the food. Music has long been part of the deal for the designer and creative director, and they’re the first to appreciate how sensational taste and the best music fit together like hamburger and bun.
Walker was drawn to Gherman in the late 1980s by his love of punk rock. As well, she liked his grasp of the importance of music as a powerful commercial enhancement, something that has only grown over the decades they have been in business together. Gherman curates the playlists for the Karen Walker stores (fully licensed, of course), sparing the customer blasting techno beats that a staff member may personally prefer. But food and music is a subject of enduring interest as well.
Many restaurants where music is served as a compulsory side order with the food – whether for reasons of ambience, staff taste or simply because the manager is paying to stream it and figures they’d better get their money’s worth – could benefit from the same sensitivity.
“The music I hate in a restaurant – I hate it in any environment, really – is music that’s thoughtless, and there’s a lot of that,” says Walker over coffee at the central Auckland headquarters of her fashion empire. “And that’s something we totally avoid in our own sphere, too – just-put-anything-on music, often illegally streaming Spotify, and totally lacking in creative intelligence.”
Gherman nods. “What’s even worse is when you go to a restaurant, a really nice place [where they’ve] spent money on it, and” – he pulls a face – “there’s a DJ mixing one track into another with exactly the same beat. I mean, what the? It just kills the mood.”
Not to mention flavour. And since this is the most popular time of the year for eating out or having people over for meals, an annual reminder of what’s sonically best served with what we eat seems apposite.
Recent studies suggest music influences more than some hosts realise, whether it’s guest behaviour, perception or spending dosh. Tempo, genre and volume play a critical role in defining the gastronomic experience. And simple common sense tells us that if music can enhance the experience, it also has the power to diminish it. And not just for Karen Walker.
Music as therapy
The story of music and food is at least as old as Puccini’s La Bohème (you know, the opera about Rodolfo and his mates who are always looking for a fantastic meal and singing about the best chow throughout), and its resonance is older still in some Middle Eastern and Central Asian cultures.
At least part of the historical story here is about psychology, taking in not only dining but much else in the mental heavens. The late neurologist Oliver Sacks, who was also a pianist, turned one of his works over to music’s wide neurological application. Music can be used therapeutically, the famous scholar recalled, in, for example, patients with Parkinson’s disease. In Musicophilia, he writes about patients with Tourette syndrome, whose tics ceased only when music was in the offing.
All of which seems to certify the qualities of music played well. But music played badly can be every bit as powerful.
Manipulative muzak
Some 90 years ago, the world discovered music played very badly indeed with the invention of the now ubiquitous muzak. The first-ever muzak recordings appeared in 1934 and included a medley of Whispering, Do You Ever Think of Me? and Here in My Arms, performed originally by the Sam Lanin Orchestra and trialled in a number of outlets in Cleveland, Ohio.
Later, as Time magazine has reported, an early test conducted at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey found that “functional music” in the workplace reduced absenteeism by 88%. In Pennsylvania – and here the food angle starts to kick in – one scientist discovered that piping The Blue Danube waltz into a dairy farm resulted in cows giving more milk and chickens laying more eggs.
But consumers aren’t chickens and cows, a point some have gone to great lengths to make. Such was the case in 1952, Time reported, when bus commuters in Washington DC petitioned the US Supreme Court to rule on whether the infliction of terrible radio music on the bus was unconstitutional. The court disagreed, although Justice William Douglas in his dissent asserted the musical principle that “the right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom”.
Indeed, as many diners well know, clanking dishes and baying tables of diners put to the rhythm of clubby beats can be just as much a distraction when eating out. And diners are not the only ones at risk, according to Courtenay Kenny, an occupational medicine specialist based at Auckland’s North Shore Hospital.
Some guests call ahead of time to verify noise levels and even the likely playlists.
Though non-stop loud music in a restaurant probably doesn’t damage people’s hearing, there’s an “audiological nuisance factor” to being exposed to it as a worker, Kenny says. “There’s no doubt that staff can experience a range of negative effects on concentration, irritability, distractedness and emotional drain.”
On the other hand, entering a totally quiet dining room can also be a little creepy. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the perils of both spur some restaurant guests to call ahead of time to verify the noise levels and even the likely playlists.
And why not? Most of us want maximum return, and eating out at a decent restaurant still rates as a treat. What goes on matters from the moment we walk in the door, whether it be surly wait-staff, overpriced desserts or terrible sonics.
Eclectic mixtape
The same goes for dinner parties. Probably the most feedback from any one interview I did was occasioned by an hour-long spot on RNZ National’s Music 101 with Charlotte Ryan, in which we talked about matching food and music for social gatherings. I suggested Lou Reed’s Vicious – “You hit me with a flower” – which, in my opinion at least, seems a much better prospect for a romantic dinner than a recording of someone warbling his way through Imagine.
I believe I also mentioned Barry Manilow. Most people say they hate Baz, but they will also usually admit to lying about this after a few wines and with a fabulous radio hit like Mandy cranked up loud in the background. Another personal preference is Moby’s gorgeous keyboards atop rhythms and crack-whipped beats.
Yet another dependable late-evening dinner song for me has long been Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which is absolutely marvellous to play at the end of the party and saves all the awkwardness of having to announce it’s time for everyone to go home.
Always a subject of personal interest, at the time of the RNZ spot the issue was particularly front of mind after a night at one of my favourite Wellington eateries, the Salty Pidgin. On this particular night, the restaurant drew on the services of a gent who thought he was James Brown, performing loudly in the space next to the bar as if he was in concert at the Apollo.
A DJ mixing one track into another with exactly the same beat … It just kills the mood.
On the other side of the coin, part of the reason I enjoy breakfast at the capital’s Prefab restaurant is because its co-owner, Bridget Dunn, puts together the most fabulous playlists of half-forgotten classics and high and lonesome ballads that almost unfailingly work with the menus.
My interview attracted more feedback than anything I had done on radio before, notwithstanding the fact I managed to misquote GK Chesterton to the effect of music played while one eats can be, and usually is, an insult to both the chef and the composer.
In fact, what Chesterton said was, “I have already remarked, with all the restraint that I could command, that of all modern phenomena, the most monstrous and ominous, the most manifestly rotting with disease, the most grimly prophetic of destruction, the most clearly and unmistakably inspired by evil spirits, the most instantly and awfully overshadowed by the wrath of heaven, the most near to madness and moral chaos, the most vivid with devilry and despair, is the practice of having to listen to loud music while eating a meal in a restaurant.”
Sound recording, of course, was very much a work in progress in Chesterton’s time; he was almost certainly referring to live violinists and the like.
What the grand old man of English letters might have made of nibbles at certain venues in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter is probably best not speculated on.
Music and hunger
But if it’s intuitively obvious to most of us that music can influence our behaviour towards food, the specifics of how and why this happens can be a little more elusive.
An international study published in the journal Food Research International looked at the effect of music on hunger, fullness, desire to eat and the liking of foods – as considered by subjects viewing real lunch food items. A co-author of the study,
Nazimah Hamid, a professor of food science at Auckland University of Technology, says 50 participants were asked to view lunch options in silence and while listening to music they either liked or disliked.
The researchers measured physiological responses such as heart and respiratory rates to gauge emotions under each condition. When participants listened to music they hated, hunger ratings went up and mood levels went down; when they liked the music, there were higher ratings of healthy and unhealthy food pleasantness, overall food approval and satisfaction.
Those conclusions dovetail with recent research from Britain’s University of Lincoln, in which 360 women were tested to see if listening to music reduced the amount of food eaten while one is sad. The scholars first asked participants to recall sad memories ahead of giving them snacks to eat. One group sat in silence while eating and the other group got to listen to their favourite music. The ones who listened to their self-selected songs ate half as much as the others.
But music is tricky, says Hamid. “You need to find something that makes everyone comfortable, but then not everyone is going to be as comfortable with the same music or sounds. I mean, somebody might like the sounds of birds; another person may find it equally irritating.” To this end, she also looks at the effects on emotions of the sounds of forest and birds, cafe babble and, just for fun, machine sounds.
On the epicurean front, she mentions the Fat Duck in Berkshire, the three-Michelin-star restaurant (just 14 tables, and up to 30,000 reservation attempts a day) that offers a dish called Sound of the Sea, which includes a customised audio element.
In New York, the bistro Camaje (now Abigail’s Kitchen) drew on the audio element by offering “dinners in the dark”, at which guests were expected to don a cushioned blindfold and walk in one by one, conga line-style, to try the menu, and for the next 21/2 hours it’s all sound but no vision. Dans Le Noir? in Auckland does something a bit similar.
Hamid, who was born and raised in Malaysia, seems like an ideal candidate to ask about the often-baffling tendency of “ethnic” restaurants to play only music deemed to reflect the same ethnicity as the meals (Irish-styled pubs are mortal offenders in this food writer’s opinion).
“Well, look at consumer purchase and music in supermarkets,” she responds. “Studies have shown that when supermarkets were playing a certain kind of ‘ethnic’ music – German, say – customers were choosing the same kinds of German products. So, it does influence consumer behaviour, yes, but how that works out in restaurants … well, not so much [research] has been done. I think tempo and other characteristics of music might be more of a big factor.”
Not that it matters in her cultural case, Hamid adds. Music is not played often with food in the Malaysian setting, “at least, not outside the more expensive restaurants that use neutral music to build an ambience – it’s white noise, really”.
All of which chimes with Karen Walker. “This is why we’re quite specific about creating a sensory experience,” she says with feeling. “Music is like scent, really, when you walk in somewhere … it’s fragrance of a sort, and fragrance is memory.”
And musical memory, which every restaurateur, dinner party host, home chef or snakehipped fashionista overlooks at their peril, lingers much longer than what’s on the plates.
David Cohen co-authored Ima Cuisine (Penguin Random House NZ) and wrote and co-edited The RNZ Cookbook (Massey University Press).
