Tasty Sounds Wireless Audio Lollipop by Amos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyYjqgHcp74

The Reckless Gastronome

Martin Peyruc, Reporter

“Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?” Hello friends, I’m the Reckless Gastronome and while the quote is originally from Shakespeare, I’m using it as a quote from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. If you all will forgive me for being a bit (more) pretentious (yes, I’ve been holding back, this isn’t even my final form), I want to talk a bit about the nature of food. For some people food is nothing more than fuel, a collection of numbers that if you consume enough of you keep your body functioning. Those people are weirdos (yeah, not apologizing, they are the antithesis of everything I believe in), for most people food occupies many parts of the human experience. Food is acknowledged as part of social bonding, a cultural and regional signifier, an emotional comfort, and many other things. There is however one role that frequently gets less acclaim than the others, food as entertainment.

As children we are frequently admonished not to play with our food. While much of that is an effort to avoid messes (I recently hosted my four-year-old niece and I’m still finding macaroni and fruit snacks all around the house), somewhere in growing up that morphs into an aversion to treating food as something fun. Even treating food as art is often underappreciated, with it being given less consideration than more “serious” mediums. It hasn’t always been this way either, medieval chefs used to create “subtleties” to delight guests with dishes like the Cockentrice which was a suckling pig sewn together with a large game bird, or pies baked with live animals inside (Sing a Song of Sixpence, with its four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie isn’t just a flight of fancy), and even miniature pieces of architecture (I guess the chefs were the Doozers to the nobles Fraggles). I know I would like to go Godzilla through an edible city.

The Chinese poet, Yuan Mei is quoted as saying “you eat with your eyes first” but why shouldn’t we taste with our ears? No, we don’t have secret tastebuds in there and definitely don’t try putting Smarties in your ear (they are very hard to remove, it won’t make you smarter and no, I don’t have to explain why I know this). In my very roundabout way, I’m finally talking about today’s review TastySounds Audio Lollipops (took me long enough, I’m already three paragraphs in). They are quite simply lollipops that play music when you put them in your mouth (again, do not put them in your ear).

Now you may be wondering how they work, do they have minuscule speakers or perhaps a band of tiny pixies live inside?  No, they work through a process known as Bone Conduction which sounds like a cartoon skeleton directing an orchestra, but instead is vibrations traveling through your skull and directly to your cochlea which is the part of the inner ear that is responsible for our perception of sound. It is the principle behind many hearing aids, and has been used as such since the 15^th century. Beethoven (the musician, not the St. Bernard) is rumored to have used a metal rod attached his piano that he placed in his mouth to continue creating music after losing his hearing. More recently bone conduction headphones have become popular as a way to listen to music without blocking the ears. As an aside, bone conduction is also why listening to recordings of your own voice sound so weird, bone conducts lower frequencies better than higher ones, so basically you are used hearing yourself with the bass boost always on.

Now this might seem like I’m digressing (I’m at the point of my digressions having their own digressions) quite a bit from being a food review, but there is a reason why I’m bringing all this up (other than padding out my article). There is research that claims that sound can actually affect flavor. Higher frequencies make foods sweeter and sourer, while lower frequencies accentuate bitterness. Loud noises reduce sweetness but make umami more intense. I’ve heard of foods making your tastebuds sing, but I hadn’t realized that it works in reverse as well. There are other examples of cross-modal correspondence (that’s what this phenomenon is called) such as crunchy food signifying freshness and faster paced music leading to faster eating.

For my actual review I’m only going to review two different lollipops, I know the first picture has the four pack of KPop flavors (I’ve been on a KPop kick after KPop Demon Hunters, but I’m sure I’ll return to my standard fare of sea shanties and costumed heavy metal eventually), but honestly there’s not much I can say about standard flavors. Does cherry taste like cherry? Does it taste more cherry than other cherry flavored things? Not exactly riveting stuff. So, I’m going to review the Sea Salt Lemon flavor, which is at least an uncommon pairing and the Bluetooth capable Blackberry flavor to see if playing different sounds really can make a perceptible difference. Don’t worry, I won’t be rating the music, since I think most people won’t share my musical tastes (although you should).

We will start with Sea Salt Lemon. Salted lemon isn’t a common flavor in the States, but it is popular in Asia and Africa. Whole lemons are preserved in salt and then used as an ingredient in other dishes like stews, sauces, and even Vietnamese Salted Lemonade. It reminds me a bit of Lemon-Lime Gatorade, but the salt isn’t as pronounced. The sweetness is also much less than most lemon candies which is a nice changeup. I should also warn that it is made with xylitol which is perfectly safe for humans, but absolutely dangerous for dogs (not that you should share lollipops with your dog no matter how much they beg). It also makes anything you taste afterwards much more extreme, which I learned while preparing for my next lollipop. Of course, just reviewing the flavor isn’t enough, so let’s talk about the music. Inside the box there is a bag with two earplugs, they do help you hear the music, but aren’t strictly necessary. The music also works best if you hold the candy between your back teeth (it will still play after the candy is gone and the box claims the battery will last for 60 minutes, but I’m not going to test that). Each lollipop comes with two songs, the songs on this flavor are Style and Rainbow Heaven. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give the artist information but I was able to figure out that Rainbow Heaven is by Chang Kim and Velvet Williams. I couldn’t figure out who recorded Style, the KPop songs I found with the same name don’t sound alike, and honestly, I’m not familiar enough (or at all) with the Korean language to track it down via the lyrics.

Next, we have Blackberry Flavor with Bluetooth. Blue teeth are what you’d normally expect after a blackberry lollipop (sorry, even I think that joke is lame). This seems like the perfect time to test if sound affects flavor. I personally don’t expect it to work at all, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. First let’s get a baseline (a control, for you science types) taste with no sound at all. It’s good, not too sweet, very clearly blackberry. If you know what a blackberry tastes like, you know what a blackberry candy tastes like (this is why I don’t review normal flavors). Next, we try 10 kilohertz, this is supposed to make things sweeter. I couldn’t taste a difference, but a blind taste test I subjected my spouse (so very trusting) to they said it did in fact taste sweeter. I’m not sure if I failed because of counter placebo effect or if my time trying to get it to connect to YouTube had meant that I had simply gone taste blind. Then we try 50 hertz. This is supposed to increase bitterness, but it was undetectable by both of us. It turns out bone conduction doesn’t work very well below 2 kilohertz. All this testing has given me a headache, so I decided to finish off the lollipop with Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me with Science (Science!).

I suppose I should share some of my complaints before we finish this up. The music doesn’t come through that clearly, there’s a bit of a hollow sound (yeah, yeah, make a joke about my skull). Low frequencies don’t convey well, meaning you miss a lot of the bass. I don’t like the fact that they use xylitol, since I’m worried my dog might get into it (it’s not likely, but I’m a paranoid puppy papa). Finally, it all seems rather wasteful. Once you’ve finished with the candy, there’s not much reason to keep the stick even though it will still work. The Bluetooth one is rechargeable and has the ability to replace the candy heads, but Amos doesn’t have any for sale at this time, so there is no point. None of these are deal breakers, but it does mean that I wouldn’t get too many of them.

Is whole musical lollipop thing a gimmick? Most assuredly, but that doesn’t make it bad. It’s an interesting concept that no one has explored before so I give them credit for that. Back to my original point of should food be fun, I absolutely believe that it should be. Would you rather be a mopey Galactus, who eats planets because he must or a vivacious Unicron who revels in the act? Life is made of experiences, the more interesting things that you have done, the more you have actually lived.

Ordered directly from amossweets.com, but I have seen other flavors at Safeway and Five Below.