Pitch perfect perfumes: Correspondence between musical features and olfactory perception
Calling all fragrance fanatics and music masters! Does your favorite song have a scent? If it doesn’t, act fast, because recent research explores how the notes we hear can correspond to the notes we smell. Please pull up a chair, spritz your favorite scent, and let’s harmonize our knowledge about these intriguing crossmodal correspondences.
Do you associate light hearted and happy tunes with hints of citrus and linens? Let’s do a test run; “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield: think of the clean, invigorating scent of morning dew on green leaves, combined with the airy, light notes of a clear blue sky. Add a hint of citrus for a touch of energizing zest, that feels like a breath of fresh air, inspiring and well, unwritten… If you still aren’t convinced, recent research has shown that high auditory pitches equate to fresh and zesty scents like citrus, while lower pitches often inspire warmer, earthier smells like musk or caramel.
The first person to suggest this unusual harmony was Piesse back in 1867, who thought that perfumes could be made according to notes on a musical scale. Skip a beat and more recent studies confirm this theory, with high notes giving lemon and fruity, while musks and dark chocolates gave moody… and low notes. However, not everyone plays to the same rhythm, as there has been some controversy surrounding what “fresh” really means. In English, it seems to evoke a sense of crisp,and “light” air, while in French, it suggests a coolness.
This recent data comes from a study conducted in Argentina seeking to determine if there really is this correlation that allows you to pinpoint a scent to a song and vice versa. First, researchers had 14 pianists smell a scent and play a piece that they considered to represent what they had just smelled. Then, a group of 15 students described the scents and ranked them on a scale of high to low notes, to give their opinion on how high or low the scent smelled. For both aspects of this experiment, all of your favorite odors were used including vanilla, cinnamon, mint, rosemary, peach, smoke, lemon, and more for a total of 20 smells.
The results are somewhat sensational! The following table shows how the scents were characterized individually by the 14 pianists and the pitch of sounds that was played to them.
At first glance, these results aren’t too crisp. These raw associations were then averaged and placed on a statistical Principal component analysis (PCA) to get the following averaged results of the table below. The left graph depicts the 14 pianist’s rankings, while the right shows the highest statistically significant results from 8 pianists. We see that lemon and mint appear to be the highest sounding note, while smoke wins the lowest key. The experience of the pianists seems to have had great effect on the results, but even with these rather loud results (literally) a crossmodal association was found with the olfactory fresh/light smells relating to a higher pitch.
Now, of course we have to discuss the complexity of this experiment. Unlike previous experiments, which often focused on predetermined musical compositions, this experiment embraced musical expression, and allowed pianists to personalize their own definitions and musical parameters within a discrete setting. So, on a lower note, of course there are going to be caveats in an experiment where a pianist can play essentially whatever they define to correlate with a smell.
Yet, this relationship between high-pitched music and olfactory freshness/lightness, has been found in previous studies, thus providing strong evidence for this association, even though it was not necessarily uniform across all pianists. It is also important to acknowledge that the authors made sure to take into account the years of formal music training (FMT), years of contact with music (YCM), and years of experience with piano (YEP) for each pianist, which did seem to have quite an effect on the results. The methods they used to analyze this data also included multiple cross validation analyses to try and control for as much variability as possible.
Additionally, this study took on another challenge of exploring a possible correlation between gender and scent, and did find strong correlations between masculine/feminine odors and musical complexity, which is relatively unwritten territory in crossmodal research, although it may seem pretty obvious as a member of society.
Perhaps next time, authors can eliminate gender biases and separate participants by gender and odor stimuli intensity, as well as a questionnaire about general scent familiarity and perfume use. Afterall, a perfume fanatic pianist might have a very different outlook compared to a pianist who prefers a more natural, unenhanced scent of nothingness.
Next time you dab on some perfume or cologne, think about the music it might play in your mind. Do you have a different tune that might play in your head? This research into how we perceive and intertwine our senses continues to reveal that perhaps life is more of an orchestra than we realize, and that each element of our sensory system is somewhat in tune with another. This intersection of scents and sounds opens up a new discussion about how we characterize our auditory and olfactory senses, and is surely not over yet. Keep your senses alert for what the next note might be in this ongoing symphony of scents and sound, because after all…the rest is still unwritten.
