Music and Food: What Sound Does to a Meal

Picture a wealthy household's dining room in Hamburg in the 1730s, with a small ensemble playing music written for exactly that purpose: light enough not to compete with the food, lively enough to carry the conversation. Nearly three centuries later, a sound engineer in a new restaurant is choosing a playlist, setting a volume and deciding whether the bar should be louder than the dining room. It is the same question, asked with better speakers.

Music and food have always shared a table. What has changed is that we can now measure some of what the music does.

How long have people eaten to music?

For as long as there are records of feasts. Music at banquets and drinking parties is attested in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and by the sixteenth century German speakers had a word for it: Tafelmusik, table music. According to the overview of the form, Johann Hermann Schein's Banchetto musicale of 1617 became widely known, and composers in Germany and France turned dinner music into a recognised genre built on dance suites.

The best-known collection came later. Georg Philipp Telemann published his Tafelmusik in 1733, writing for Hamburg's educated trading elite. As one music writer puts it, such music was meant to be light, melodious and simple, so that it would not compete with the dishes or the talk. That brief would satisfy most restaurant designers today.

What the composers knew by instinct, researchers began to test in the twentieth century. The results are more interesting than the old idea of music as decoration.

Can music change what guests choose?

Yes, and often without them noticing. In a study published in Nature in 1997, the psychologists A. North, D. Hargreaves and J. McKendrick set up a supermarket display of four French and four German wines, matched for price and sweetness. On alternate days over two weeks, they played French accordion music or German Bierkeller music, and swapped the shelf positions halfway through.

French wine outsold German wine when the French music played. German wine outsold French when the German music played. When shoppers were asked afterwards, the music had made them think of the matching country, yet only six of the 44 who answered said the music had influenced their choice.

The lesson for a dining room is not to manipulate guests. It is that music is never neutral. A playlist chosen by whoever opens up is still a choice, and it is still shaping the evening.

Does the tempo of music change how long guests stay?

The evidence says it does. In 1986, Ronald Milliman reported in the Journal of Consumer Research that tempo significantly affected how long restaurant guests stayed and what they bought. His work set the thresholds many later studies use: fast music at 94 beats per minute or more, slow music at 72 or fewer.

A 2024 field experiment in Tel Aviv tested the same idea at an Italian restaurant across 282 tables. Diners at fast-tempo tables stayed an average of 57 minutes, the control group 69 and the slow-tempo tables 80, so slow music kept people about 40 per cent longer than fast music. Bills did not change significantly. Tips rose slightly with fast music.

That is a useful finding for anyone thinking about table turn time. Tempo is a dial. A busy lunch room and a long tasting dinner want it set differently, and a single all-day playlist sets it for neither.

Can sound actually season food?

It can nudge taste in a predictable direction. Researchers at Oxford's Crossmodal Research Laboratory, led by Charles Spence, have found that people reliably match tastes to sounds: sweetness to high pitches and tinkling piano, bitterness to low, brassy tones. In a study reported by Smithsonian magazine, 20 people in a sound booth rated the same toffee sweeter while listening to a higher-pitched soundtrack than to a lower, bitter one.

The sound of the food itself matters too. In Spence's review of the sounds of eating, he describes an experiment in which participants bit 180 Pringles while hearing their own crunch played back through headphones. When the sound was louder or its high frequencies boosted, the crisps seemed crisper and fresher. About three quarters of participants thought the crisps had come from different packs.

Heston Blumenthal took the idea to the menu at The Fat Duck. After research with Spence found that oysters were rated more pleasant with sounds of the sea than with farmyard noises, he created a seafood dish served with an iPod hidden in a shell, playing waves. As Scientific American described it, the sound is part of the plate.

A dining room has a sound whether or not anyone designed it.

Why does a noisy room flatten flavour?

Loud noise appears to dull some tastes and sharpen others. In Spence's 2014 review of noise and food, he describes work by Woods and colleagues in which 48 people ate under loud (75 to 85 decibels) or quiet (45 to 55 decibels) noise through headphones. Under loud noise, salty foods tasted less salty and sweet foods less sweet. Cornell researchers found something similar at 85 decibels, roughly the noise inside a jet cabin: sweetness dropped, while umami grew stronger. It may be one reason so many people order tomato juice on planes.

Restaurants are often louder than that. The same review cites readings of around 90 decibels in busy North American restaurants in 2008, and averages of 94 to 102 decibels measured by a New York Times reporter in 2012. It also reports that a Zagat survey found noise to be diners' second most common complaint, after poor service. Because each 10 decibel rise roughly doubles how loud a sound seems, a room at 80 is perceived as twice as loud as one at 70.

What should a dining room sound like?

Quiet enough to talk without strain, with music that supports the pace you want. The critic Tom Sietsema's scale, quoted in the noise review, is a handy guide: under 60 decibels is quiet, 60 to 70 allows easy conversation, 71 to 80 needs raised voices and over 80 is extremely loud.

A few practical steps follow:

1. Measure the room with a phone decibel app at peak, not at setup.
2. Treat at least two perpendicular surfaces, such as the ceiling and one wall, with sound-absorbing material, as the review recommends.
3. Match tempo to the service: slower at dinner, brighter at a quick lunch.
4. Choose instrumental music for most rooms. Voices compete with conversation.
5. Write the volume and playlist into the closing and opening checklist, so the room sounds the same whoever is on.

The idea that sound is part of hospitality is not new. Telemann's diners understood it. What is new is that we can hear, in the data, how much it shapes the meal. For the visual half of the same story, read Where the Light Gathers, and for how the whole room affects ordering, see restaurant interior design.