Music and Fermentation: Playing Records to a Sourdough Starter

I started playing guitar in secondary school, became thoroughly captivated by music, and ended up going to a music college in the United States. I still work in and around music, and I imagine I spend more hours with it than most.

One day, while getting a sourdough going, it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if I played music to the starter. Fermentation happens when microbes break down sugars and proteins. And microbes are living things — so if you gave them an environment they found agreeable, might fermentation go better?

There is precedent of a sort: sake, made by the action of koji, is brewed to brewing songs in cellars all over Japan. Since the 1990s the relationship between music and fermentation has been studied in various places, with reports that wine exposed to musical vibration ferments and matures better and tastes rounder. (*Reference)

So I decided to run an experiment of my own: play music to a sourdough starter and see whether fermentation differed.

What you need (two of each):

• Sourdough starter10g
• Bread flour (Kitanokaori)10g
• Water10cc
• Jar

I took two jars of the same size, put 10g of starter in each, and fed each with 10g of bread flour and 10cc of water, stirring well. One went on top of an audio speaker; the other in a corner of the kitchen where the music would not easily reach. Then I watched to see whether the rise differed.

The room was at 28°C and 55% humidity that day — fairly good conditions for a starter to rise. Comparing them side by side after about two hours, the one on the speaker had clearly begun rising sooner. Then another two hours.

Whether it really was the music alone I cannot say, but there was a difference in how fast the starters rose. The one on the speaker was clearly further along and more risen.

And looking closely, the bubbles in the starter that sat on the speaker vary more in size.

Taken at face value, this suggests that playing music to a sourdough starter speeds up fermentation. I do not know the scientific basis, but it does feel as though the vibration of the music is doing something.

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The music used in this experiment

· Bach : Viola da gamba Sonata / Glenn Gould & Leonard Rose
· Iwai no Uta / Yuni Mori