“Smell is the sense of memory and desire.”
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
We perceive our surroundings via our senses. The total experience and perception is the combination of all sensorial impressions, together with its congruency. Our sense of smell is our most emotional and intuitive sense. Scents influence our lives both on a conscious and subconscious level.
Take music. Music can emotionally move us, thrill and surprise us. It is therefore no coincidence that the vocabulary and expressions for music are quite similar to those for scents (accords, tones, creations, high, low etc).
Music composer and scent composer work together
For the performance Narcissus, play for music + scent, of composer Calliope Tsoupaki Annindriya created the scents and scent performance. Narcissus was performed amongst others at Muziekgebouw aan t IJ (Amsterdam), Korzo (The Hague) and De Vereeniging (Nijmegen) by Het Nieuw Amsterdams Peil and at Megaron (Athens) by Ergon Ensemble, together with Calliope Tsoupaki and Tanja Deurloo, as respectively music composer and scent composer.
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