The entire purpose of remaining as a ghost rather than moving on is that they generally fear death or are clinging desperately to life.This desire to be alive causes them to strive for even the smallest taste. The act is merely them attempting to experience the things about parties which they so wistfully remember from their lifetime. I don't believe the food truly has a taste for them so much as a faint memory of something you once taste, almost like when you see a cake on television and think about how delicious it looks. I don't think there is really anything more potent to the rotten food; it could be taken as symbolic or it could be a delusion of the ghosts' that it allows them to taste it. As for the music I believe there may be something to the "nails on a chalkboard" sound. Being a ghost, I imagine, is like watching a three dimensional movie. You can see and hear everything but it is sort of muted and far away. A more intense sound would create a sharper more life-like experience. This also accounts for the lack of taste and smells. A ghostly existence is often described in the series as a pale imitation of life and that is always what it brought to mind. Able to see and speak but never really experience.

I agree with UrictheOddball in that this “almost” tasting of food for ghosts is probably just that they want it so badly that they sort of delude themselves into thinking that they can taste the food. And they do this by applying their memories of eating to the food they are trying to taste. Ghosts aren’t able to manipulate solid objects, so I find it hard to believe that they could actually taste the food. The rotten food and the horrible music is just a way for the ghosts to feel a little connected to the world again, I suppose.

We know that ghosts can interact with SOME things in the real world though: Myrtle is able to flood her bathroom somehow so she can manipulate water. Nick can be wafted to the hospital wing with a large fan when he’d been Ghost-Petrified later on in CoS. But we don’t really know how this petrification changed Nick’s body, so we can’t be sure that he would have been able to be wafted away in his usual form. We also, as was brought up above, know that Madam Pomfrey was somehow able to cure Nick of his petrification. We don’t know how she did this, but it’s safe to assume that there is SOME way to alter the Potion or whatever that she gave the students so that it could work on a ghost.

I see ghosts as being made-up of some form of energy, so maybe while they can’t interact with solid objects, they can manipulate or be manipulated by other forms of energy? Obviously light and sound have an effect on them as they can hear and see things. They can (maybe) be wafted around by wind. They can somehow will ghostly letters into existence (Nick’s letter from Sir Delaney-Podmore) so they can expend energy too, I guess. Maybe that’s how Myrtle flooded her bathroom?

Anyway I think that the ghosts are solidly in our world, and not half-way behind the veil. Like they can’t travel between the worlds (Nick says so in OotP). But they just have very little influence over any of their surroundings, I suppose. What interests me the most is whether the ghosts’ bodies contain their souls. Or do their souls move on while they are just left behind as an imprint? Because if the latter is the case, then there is really no reason for staying behind anyway, because the real you has moved on, right? So if ghosts actually contain the soul of the living person.. could a Dementor feed on a ghost?

I believe that any ghost who thinks he or she can taste food, (however rotten it may be,) is foolish and, that most ghosts attempting to taste food only try in a 'wishful thinking' kind of way. I think that once you are dead, even if you choose to 'come back' as a ghost, you can neither touch nor taste anything in the world of the living. (How do some ghosts effect objects then; like say, Moaning Myrtle turning on her taps? I think that’s down to emotion rather than physical touch. But anyway, that’s a different discussion.) Touch, taste, even smell, are things that are all reserved solely for humans and are benefits of being alive.
The senses ghosts seem to retain include sight and also sound (as they can converse with living humans quite naturally and easily,) so, I have no insight to what the horrible screechy music is about. By all logical thinking they should be able to enjoy our music with relative ease. I can only think that during the ‘becoming a ghost’ part something shifts in their hearing or demeanor and/or personality/anatomy (etc.) and they enjoy this other music instead. Not being a ghost myself, I cannot confirm what their hearing is like. If any ghosts are able to get someone to type a comment for them on this comment section, please do let us know what your ghostly hearing is like.
I also believe that ghosts are firmly ‘stuck’ in our world. Nearly-Headless-Nick says in OotP that “he cannot answer [what happens when someone dies]…[he knows] nothing of the secrets of death,”(OotP, Ch. 38 [Sorry, I haven’t got page numbers, as I’m going off of the audio books at the moment.]) and therefore cannot tell Harry anything about it. I think, therefore, that a ghost, while dead, could not tell you anything about death, afterlife, how to ‘move on’, or describe anything to do with the world of the dead. Which leads me to believe, that they have to be solely in our world; they cannot drift between the ‘living world’ and the ‘dead world.’ They are in the living world but yet are dead, and that’s what is so interesting about them. They don’t really belong in our world, (think resurrection stone, "…yet she was sad and cold, separated from him as by a veil.” (DH, Ch. 21)) but, they chose not to ‘go on’ into the world they really belong in and now are stuck here, unable to ever join the world they should have gone to.
For me this brings up a lot of questions. For example, how do the ghosts get clothes? Are they seen only in the clothes they die in? If yes, how are they able to change clothes? (Nick is observed wearing a different, “…particularly large [and]…extra festive” ruff than he usually wears in GoF (Ch. 12)) If no, is there some great ghostly shopping center somewhere? And then, how are the clothes created? Are they dead clothes? How do you kill clothes? And then, what about the headless hunt? They are all seen riding horses. Are the horses all ghosts? Does that mean they, the horses, chose to be ghosts rather than die? And does that, in turn, mean that horses can chose to ‘go on’ or not, giving them some type of intellectual thought as acute as human beings? And, I’ve always wondered, what about ghostly correspondence? Nick is seen holding a letter from the headless hunt in CoS (Ch. 8) that is described as “transparent.” Does this mean that the letter is made up of some ghostly paper? Is it also dead? How did Nick write a letter to Sir Patrick and how did Sir Patrick respond if neither can hold a quill? Or, did they either use a ‘dead quill’ or get someone to write a letter for them? In which case how could a human write on ‘dead paper’ or where would you buy a ‘dead quill,’ (perhaps in the shopping center with the dead clothes?!?!) This could just go on and on. Ghosts are fraught with complications. I think partly the answer could be, “it’s magic,” but, still, would one use a spell to achieve all of these things? What spell(s)? Maybe this is something the Dept. for the Regulation of Magical Creatures; (Beast, Being, and Spirit Division) handles? I’d love to hear the cast talk about ghosts more on a future episode.

Personally, the Deathday Party (which struck me as a very Roald Dahl-esque scene) always reminded me of my favourite Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale -- The Snow Queen.

[For those who haven't read it, the story goes as follows: the Devil makes a magic mirror *much like the Mirror of Erised* which shows the OPPOSITE of what it sees, flipping the nature of whatever is reflected in it - so that a beautiful rose would be hideous, and a hideous troll would be beautiful, etc.]
Anyway, the Devil and his minions try to carry the mirror to Heaven, so they can make fools of all the Angels, but on the way the Mirror shatters, scattering tiny shards all over the world.
One of these shards gets into the eye of a little boy, who from then on sees bad things as good and good things as bad (like his sweet little friend, who suddenly appears ugly and hateful).

So, to me, that Deathday Party showed how startlingly different are the *priorities* of the dead -- that their taste, in death, has become totally opposite to what it was in life (eg. like their taste in music).

As to the rotting food: I love the idea that what the Ghosts are really tasting is the 'memory' of a certain flavour (nice one, CentaurSeeker!)

J. K. seems to conflate a person's Soul with their Memory (so that a person who has been Kissed by a Dementor, and has no soul, ~also~ has no Memory).

Which in turn is interesting because it implies that when a Legilimens look into another person's head / sees their memories -- what they're REALLY reading isn't their Mind, but their SOUL.

If ghosts are a pale imprint of the people they were in life (in taste as well as in fact -- no longer Beings but Has-Beens ^_^), maybe they're just like the embodiment of a collection of Memories that that person had? (even including the memory of how they died!)

I kind of feel like the things mentioned in The Death Day Party are things Jo made up on the spot as something silly for the young kids, but as the books matured this kind of thing lessened so I don't think it really means much in the Potter lore (at least to me.) The idea that ghosts actually like that kind of music seems comical to me, rather than something serious. Perhaps these two things are ritual of Death Day Parties? It is a celebration of being "spooky" or scary, since to humans rotting food is gross and adds to the "creepy" factor or a party about death. The same thing with the music, "music" like that is definitely scary and adds to the ambiance. Ghosts do seem to be preoccupied with being scary (at least most do), so it would only seem natural to have a particularly scary party that is focused on death. Maybe ghosts like Nick, who seem really into the idea of being scary, have convinced themselves to like this sort of music because it makes them seem more ghostly, whereas other ghosts aren't all eaten up with being a stereotypical ghost (like the Bloody Baron, or the Fat Friar). I can understand the rotten food thing a bit more, that the ghosts use it as a way of trying to relive their past and that the more potent it is the more that can sense it and thus a stronger memory is conjured. I think if they can hear normal human voices they can hear music just fine, so that the music at the party is just for ambiance.

On the basic idea of ghosts, I think ghosts can pass through the physical world and the afterlife, but can never be fully apart of either. They have unfinished business so they can't fully go on, but I think manifesting yourself as a ghost takes a lot of energy so they need somewhere to "recharge" so they can go into maybe a lower level of the afterlife and spend time there before they go back to the real world. I think in the afterlife there is no need to taste or feel so there isn't anything like that there, but the memories are so strong there they don't have a desire for things in the real world. But the full afterlife is much different than the diluted version of the afterlife ghosts get.

And just to mention poltergeists, I read that they were around children so often was because they were created by the energy that children and teens create. They are more likely to show up in homes or places where there are a lot of teenagers because teenagers have so many strong feelings all of the time, and poltergeists are created and feed off of these emotions and all of that energy. They mostly feed off of strong negative energy so if a teenager is angry or upset there is more likely going to be accidents involving the poltergeist. If the teenager(s) learn to control their energy or their strong negative feelings the poltergeist will go away because it literally is a manifestation of those emotions. Also poltergeists generally have no visual form and are just pure energy.

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