Tunes You Can Eat

This week retro-gadget collector and video blogger [Techmoan] featured perhaps the most delicious audio recording format that we know of — a chocolate gramophone record. (Video, embedded below.) Compared to his typical media format explorations, the chocolate record is of quite recent vintage. He first heard of them back in 2015 when Tasmanian artist [Julia Drouhin] offered chocolate recordings as part of her art project. The one that [Techmoan] finally obtained was from a UK chocolatier who offers them with custom labelling and your choice of two songs. There are some pointers in the video about how to playback your chocolate disk without ruining it (use the lightest stylus tracking force as possible). These disks are recorded at 45 RPM on one side only, and are about the same size as a standard single. But being about five times thicker, they pack a lot more calories than your typical phonograph disk.

No reflection on the Tewkesbury Town Band, but this is probably the lowest fidelity recording media ever, but at least you can eat it when you’re done listening — label and all. We hope the Mission Impossible movie producers are paying attention so we can see the secret audio briefing being eaten instead of going up in smoke next film.

If you’re not familiar with [Techmoan], he often dredges up and reviews old media formats.  A while back we covered a review he did on a stainless steel wire recorder from the 1940s. If these things are of interest, you should definitely check out his channel.

15 thoughts on “Tunes You Can Eat

  1. Can someone please calculate the amount of chemical energy in a typical vinyl to see if the claim in the article holds true when you assume calories is referring to both nutritional and non nutritional chemical energy. (calculations assuming an external source if oxygen)

    1. After doing the numbers, it looks like it is true. The heat of combustion for vinyl is 18 MJ/kg, and the numbers I found for chocolate are ~150 kcal/oz, which converts to ~22 MJ/kg. Both chocolate and vinyl have a density of about 1.3 g/cm^3. So yes, an equivalently sized chocolate record has a little over 20% more calories than a vinyl record. Add in the fact that these chocolate records are 5 times thicker, and that’s ~6 times more calories.

    1. “Obi Wan-Kenobi, you are our only hope!” “And considering these plans for a Death Star were encoded on these pieces of chocolate, the Rebellion will have to find a weakness in it without them. (smacks her lips)”

  2. I have a couple of stainles steel wire players mentioned myself, they were a bit more popular in Sweden, since the Swedish brand Luxor made them, so it is not that unusual that he makes it out to be.
    They were marketed as “Luxor Trådspelare” wich translates to Luxor Wireplayers, and the spools of wire was branded “Den talande tråden” translates to The talking wire.
    It should be easyer to make records of hard sugar candy, but I wouldn’t want to clean the needle after playing it.

  3. I have a CD made of bubble gum that was a promotional for Garth Brooks….country music singer. It is in my collection. When you open the cd case you can still smell the strawberry flavoring.

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