Sunday, January 22, 2012

The Big Black Bechstein in the Middle of the Room






Perfume as Music


For years I have been trying to persuade myself to believe that perfumes are closer to poems than to other art forms. I have gone so far as to devise lists of identity claims which presumably demonstrate the truth of this apparently preposterous theory (see: Perfumes, Persons, and Poems). In all of this frenzy of activity, I have somehow failed to see the Big Black Bechstein in the middle of the room: that, in fact, perfume is much closer to music than it is to poetry.

Several lines of reasoning have fortuitously converged more or less simultaneously upon this same conclusion. Some of the first interlocutors to help to jolt me from my dogmatic slumber were Bob Johnson and one T.S. Brock (in comments at another site), who pointed out problems with my “perfumes as poetry” theory. More recently, in a response to the salon discussion of Duchamp's Fontaine and  ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, salonista Njeb offered this excellent explanation of the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art:

One reason I love abstract art is that it can go right to the primitive part of your brain and evoke feelings in a way that you aren't even really sure where they come from. What you are viewing is not really "something" and yet it makes you feel a certain way.


                             --Njeb, January 20, 2012, comment on Tower of Babel 2

In recent weeks, having set my “perfumes are poems” theory temporarily to one side while mulling over possible disparities between the two cases, I have also been trying to understand what I have been referring to as the Tower of Babel problem of radically disparate receptions to perfumes (including Sécrétions Magnifiques) in terms of selective physiological differences among various persons. It appears that people do not smell the same perfume when they praise as a masterpiece what others decry as a disaster. Or do they?

I do in fact still believe that variable sensitivities and distributions of hyposmias, anosmias, and hyperosmias may help to explain why and how a perfume such as L'Artisan Parfumeur Dzing! smells to some people like Bandaids and dung while it is heralded by others for its faithful reproduction of the scent of the kind of paper found in certain books. If we all know what Bandaids, dung, and paper smell like, then such radical distinctions in interpretation would seem to be grounded in the fact that some sniffers are not picking up on the specifically “dung-like” or “Bandaid”-like quality of that composition.

The same theory of physiological difference also explains why some reviewers appear to experience Sécrétions Magnifiques as a banal floral aquatic fragrance, not the serial killer crime scene facsimile experienced by others, myself included. All of these problems would seem to be exacerbated by the fact that different perfumes appear to express themselves differently on different wearers. Gypsy Parfumista reports, for example, that his mother dislikes Sécrétions Magnifiques on herself but finds it not unlikeable on her son, providing yet more welcome evidence for the Myth of the Skin Chemistry Myth.

Still, there appears to be something else going on as well, as was illustrated by a couple of our commentators on the Tower of Babel 2. Gypsy Parfumista and kastehelmi seemed to interpret the same perfume very differently. Does Sécrétions Magnifiques convey an interpretation of the scent of sex? Or is it rape? Attitudes toward the perfume may well have something to do with one's answer to that question.

But what is it that leads some wearers to interpret such a composition in one way rather than the other in the first place? And why is it that disagreement in perfume criticism seems to have more to do with seemingly incommensurable interpretations than with facts about (the properties of) the objects of critique, the perfumes themselves?

Conceptual Similarities
The key to all of these conundra, I am finally beginning to appreciate, may lie in the marked similarity of perfume not to poetry but to music. First of all, perfume, like music, is non-representational and nonverbal. Neither is expressed in a human language readily translatable to other human languages. Yes, some music is choral, and has text associated with it, but the music itself remains entirely distinct. Opera and related genres would seem to be hybrid art forms involving both poetry and pure music.

Many of the same qualities which mark music off as distinct from the other arts hold true for perfume as well. The contents of a bottle of perfume are not directly translatable to other human languages, though we may try our best to describe what it is that we smell. Perfume, like music, is nonrepresentational in that it does not literally represent or refer to any objects in the world.

Perfume may and certainly does evoke memories of objects, but no object is implied by any particular perfume. This is perhaps one of the reasons why people may differ so radically over the “meaning” of a perfume such as ELdO Sécrétions Magnifiques, as we have been discussing here in recent weeks.

Perfume, like music, calls forth strong emotions and memories in some but not all people, and the elicited memories may be visual images, but, in the end, whatever they are, they are much more dependent upon the wearer's or sniffer's unique history than upon the nature of the perfume itself.

Perfume, like music, may be more or less lyrical, with a development trajectory which flows and undulates, or, in the case of a linear composition, which stays the same from start to finish. This may be why those who love classic perfumes with complex development trajectories find modern linear compositions sometimes boring and banal.

Perhaps linear perfumes can be usefully compared to simpler musical forms, such as the four-chord pop score, or the familiar twang of a country music riff. Perfumes which develop differently even on the same person during different wearings may be closer to extemporaneous jazz compositions. One might want to compare simple aromachemical perfumes such as Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 to some of the minimalist music of a composer such as Philip Glass.

Classic and vintage perfumes with well-defined, and complex yet repeatable development trajectories, such that they can be meaningfully discussed by multiple wearers—who experience similar series of unfurling notes—may be closer to classical music compositions, which have stood the test of time because they appeal to so many listeners and musicians, all of whom are able to agree on the score's transcendent beauty, though they may differ in their precise understanding or, in the case of musicians, about how best to interpret the score in a performance.


Extraneous similarities
Music and perfume are also similar in the sense that particular instances of the perfume or the work of music do not exhaust the work itself. In order to preserve a work of music, it is transcribed onto a score, which provides instructions on how to bring the piece back to life through a performance. Perfumers similarly preserve their formulae so that the perfume which they initially created can be re-created, reproduced, over and over again. Some performances are bad, just as some bottles of perfume are bad, having been poorly executed by those who took themselves to be following the composer's (perfumer's) instructions.

Both music and perfume can be perverted later on down the line. A beautiful classical composition can be watered down and rendered insipid, stripped of passion and directed toward the functional purpose of providing a background noise “Muzak” in public places. Perfumes which are reformulated often suffer a similar fate: they are perverted and eviscerated through tweaking the formula in ways which may be intended to improve the original but more often are probably intended to have cost-cutting effects.

Yes, reformulation is often claimed to be necessitated by the IFRA bans, but, in reality, many more perfumes appear to have been reformulated for crassly economic reasons. Clearly, if a perfume never contained evernia prunastri or any of the other “forbidden” components, then its reformulation was not motivated by concerns with complying with the IFRA (see Reflections on Reformulation, for more on this).

Perfume can also be misused, in the way that music can be poorly performed. A composer may cringe upon hearing a grotesque interpretation of his work, and a perfumer may cringe at discovering that his masterpiece is being overapplied by some wearers to the point where the beauty of the composition becomes impossible to perceive by those who come in contact with the over-perfumed person. Those who love perfumes such as Thierry Mugler Angel and Christian Dior Poison are the first to offer advice on how properly to apply the objects of their esteem. A spritz at the hip level or into the air through which one walks are a couple of the suggestions I've seen offered by reviewers of such über-potent perfumes.

But wait, there's more: the very production of entire genres of perfumes, as of music, appears to be driven more by market forces than by the creative élan of the artists involved. In this way, both music and perfume may be produced specifically to feed into a demonstrated market, which can be exploited over and over again by producing the same old thing: repetitive pop music, on the one hand; generic aquatic and sport colognes and fruity-floral fragrances, on the other—both of which cater to a certain stratum of society which seeks the comfort of the familiar in deciding where to spend their money on new music and new perfume.

Experiential Similarities
On a deeper level, transcending the conceptual and the extraneous similarities between music and perfume, it seems that the way we process both of these art forms is deeply personal, informed even more by our personal history and experience than by the object itself. This explains, among other things, why “one perfumista's treasure is another perfumista's trash,” and why some people love while others loathe classical music. Is it wrong or misguided to hate the music of J.S. Bach? I would be surprised if many people did. What does seem to be the case is that many people have no interest in such music, because it does not speak to them.

Similarly, a classic “old lady” floral aldehyde or chypre perfume may be less than meaningless to a young person looking to smell like the typically fruity-floral fragrance which has taken the industry by storm. Consider the “sweet laundry” and the vanilla patchouli fads in current perfumery. These sorts of scents have been made to seem familiar to large swaths of the market by their near ubiquity. They have become accessible by their sheer availability.

How can an average consumer possibly develop a taste for a genre of perfume which is not currently holding sway in the corridors of Sephora? If through exposure to perfumes massively marketed through multi-million-dollar campaigns featuring celebrities who pose in glittering attire—the suggestion being that one will presumably become similar to such celebrities by donning their perfume—one comes to dispense one's perfume wallet share on those products, then it will have been already been spent. Only perfumistas, who approach their hobby and passion as a quest for truth, knowledge, and beauty, are sufficiently motivated to invest the time and energy needed to learn about currently less popular genres of perfume, including those produced by niche houses (for more on this, see The Question of Niche).

The same holds true for music. Everyone is exposed to popular music: on the radio, through mass media, etc., in fact, through many of the same avenues by which one learns of popular perfumes. Only some people are exposed to what snobs would term art music, by virtue of having parents who value formal music education or simply want to provide as many opportunities to their children as possible.

I wonder whether with the advent of the internet fewer children are taking piano and guitar lessons, but I strongly suspect that is true. Children, like adults, are now busy surfing the web. It's no longer even possible, it seems to me, for someone to be bored, provided only that they have access to the internet. But music lessons, in the past, were an important source of diversion to children, and some among them developed a serious interest in classical music as a result.

In the world of perfume, as in the world of music, market success appears to be taken more often than not as the measure of quality. There are “perfume critics” just as there are “music critics”, but their opinions appear to hold little sway against market-driven trends. Most people who consume perfume and music decide what to buy based not on what the self-proclaimed experts say, but on what they happen to like, though the range of their choices appear to be narrowed considerably by exposure to marketing and by whatever happens to be available at the time when the person is looking to acquire a new perfume.

People have finite time and so tend to become attached to certain forms of music, which necessitates a neglect of others. So, too, do people have only a finite amount of body upon which to apply perfume, and a limited number of occasions during their short lives in which to wear the perfumes which they happen to have arrived at, often purely by chance.

The more I think about these overlaps between perfume and music, the more I become convinced that perfume really is the music of the nose. Although the similarities proliferate the more I reflect upon these matters, I am specifically interested in the implications for our experience of perfume. Just as listening to a piece of music is very different from performing it, and performance is very different from composition, I continue to wonder whether part of the Tower of Babel problem inheres precisely in people's confusion about what perfume actually is.

Perfume sometimes is the focus of our attention, similar to how one focuses at a concert on the music being played. There are always distractions, but some occasions of perfume wearing seem a lot like going to a concert. I think in this connection of the perfumes of the house of Serge Lutens, which are sometimes so intense that I feel that they command my full attention.

Often, however, perfumes are worn analogously to background music. That would explain the preponderance of doggerel-like perfumes in existence. They are not worn by and large for the sake of wearing great perfume. They are worn as a form of embellishment to one's appearance, like an accessory.

Depending upon how one is regarding perfume, there will be different attitudes about whether it is living up to its perceived promise. If the promise is to be inoffensive and pleasant, then many of the mass-marketed fragrances will meet that criterion, while powerhouse fragrances and even classic perfumes may not. All of this leads directly to the question of what precisely we are doing when we write perfume reviews.

Thinking about perfume on analogy to music, some reviewers approach perfumes from the perspective of a composer: they dissect it into parts, talk about the structure, the notes, and the trajectory. Other people simply report their personal experience of pleasure or displeasure with a perfume, in the manner in which one might critique a meal, explaining what works and what does not. Still other people tell stories about the memories which the wearing of a perfume have elicited. If perfume were music, or relevantly analogous to music, what would an appropriate perfume review by a wearer be?

Having shared some of my musings on these matters, I now turn to you, my fellow fragrant travelers:

Have you ever thought of perfume in musical terms?




19 comments:

  1. I spent roughly half my life engaged in the I spent roughly half my life engaged in the study of classical music of various eras, especially from the historical and technical side, so I suppose it comes as no surprise that I tend to draw analogies with music.

    I tend to compare the construction of a perfume to the art of orchestration rather than composition. The art of orchestration is, narrowly, choosing what instrument should play what note, but more broadly, the consideration of timbre; sound-color in the art of music. It is far, far too often underestimated in our appreciation of music, but even in popular music, a cover can be quite at odds with an original, just through a change of voice and instrument.

    I sometimes compare the style of big-bones 1980's scents to the type of orchestration that reached its apex around 1900. It wasn't just the size of the orchestra, it was a certain style of chords doubled through multiple sections; a style of dense thickness that focused on richness versus clarity, lushness over grace. Just the way men's fragrances tended to have to have it all ( all the chypre, oriental, and fougere star-players at the same time ), the late Romantics had strings doubled with horns doubled with horns and woodwinds to create a very large - and at crescendo - very loud, sound.

    Similarly, some of the more jarring discords that emerged in the 20th century had as much to do with the notes placement than the notes themselves. Debussy arpeggiated and softened his dissonances, softening the impact. A touch of flute, high harp, muted strings. Stravinsky scored the same chords low down, loudly, and right up front in the texture. When I think of my favorite, Tubereuse Criminelle I think of that: a frosty wintergreen facet that exists subtly in natural tuberoses, made large and novel without actually adding a new element to the mix.

    If you score a C-major chord deep notes on the tuba, trombones and low organ stop, the effect is utterly different from middle-range piano or high-register clarinets. So in perfumery, the same notes and ingredients are used again and again, gaining novelty and interest as much through amount and surroundings as through the note itself.

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  2. Welcome to the salon, Sugandaraja, and thank you so much for these fascinating insights!

    I am very intrigued by your analogy of perfume composition to orchestration, because one of the distinctions between perfume and music is the essential ephemerality of the former vis-à-vis the latter.

    My distinct impression is that people have been perfuming themselves for as long as they've been producing and playing music, but for some reason music is recognized as a stable art, while perfumery is not. I mean generally speaking, of course. Perfumistas tend to think of perfume as high art, and probably many perfumers as well, but I do not think that average people, the "normal" consumers of perfumes, do.

    The identity of the creators of perfumes remains unknown to the vast majority of the people who appreciate the products of their art, so maybe thinking about perfumers as orchestrators makes sense in this way too: people do not give credit where credit is due, as you say, in the case of orchestrators, but also when it comes to perfume.

    Still, it seems that when landmark, iconic perfumes are produced they are as readily recognizable as a familiar piece of music. Even people who are relatively ignorant of classic music are often able to recognize the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example--even in Muzak form.

    Similarly, when we smell Chanel no. 5 or Angel or Poison or many other perfumes (the tatoo-like original perfumes--not their more recent flankers...--of the house of Calvin Klein come to mind, and also many of the creations of Sophia Grojsman) we recognize them immediately. Once they exist, we are reminded of them by all subsequent perfumes with similar “chords”.

    But I think that your comparison of orchestration to perfumers works especially well in the case of niche perfume, where often small, subtle tweaking makes the difference between various niche launches of, say, an amber perfume or a tuberose perfume or an iris perfume or....

    Thank you so much for bringing your rich musical background to bear on these matters! Which instruments do you play?

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  3. Sherapop, I was pondering a bit about your statement that perfume, as music, is nonrepresentational. However, you point out that perfume evokes memories of objects.

    I generally agree, and I think we can compare music and perfume by the extent that they relate to objects in people's imaginations. Any perfume reviewer is glad if he or she can refer to common imaginations or pictures – rarely sounds and music – in order to give a good description. It seems that we need imaginations to get hold of a fragrance.

    When is comes to music, there is the discrimination between program and absolute music. Whereas program music relates to objects outside the music – influences of poetry, nature, technical and other issues - the so called absolute music claims to stand for itself. We can easily bring together a piece of program music and a specific perfume as soon as they can be related to the same outside object: If you wanted to produce a commercial ad on Youtube for a disturbing aquatic like Tirrenico by Profumi del Forte, you could choose Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's ouverture „The Hebrides“ as soundtrack - the wave-like up and down of this melody is said to reflect the composers seasickness while traveling the Hebrides!

    But what about absolute music? If absolute music really stands for itself, can it be linked to a certain perfume? In a certain way, yes. Any music as long as it is being listened to by human beings can produce emotional status – and so can be linked to a perfume that evokes the same or a similar status. The clarity and the clear structure of J.S.Bach's Art of Fugue, that can help you come back to your senses after a hard day might be supported by an equally clear and structured perfume – Eau de Gentiane Blanche by Hermès?

    But there is lots of absolute music that I would hardly find a perfume that suits it. Which leads to the question: is there something like an absolute perfume? This should be a fragrance that simply does not smell like this or that. Something that gives you headaches if you try to describe it. Something that does not bring back peoples memories or suit certain situations.

    I am not sure about that. At least, these absolute perfumes must be very, very rare – maybe you can count in completely exotic fragrances as such. Among the Arab perfumes I came across one fragrance that I do not really know what it smells of: Oudh Ma'al Wardh by Al Haramain. However – one day I might find something I could relate it to.

    The closest perfume can get to absolute music might be those fragrances that refer to its wearer rather than to an outside situation. They might not have the beauty in themselves – like absolute music – but at least do nothing but underline the attractiveness of a person.

    The perfumer Paul Parquet (1862 - 1916 ) comes to my mind, and his sentence "If God gave ferns a scent, they would smell like Fougère Royal”. It is not so easy to relate a classic fougère accord to something else – although, with modern interpretations like Penhaligon's Sartorial, the industry makes sure that there is a story to be told. But these stories seem to always “stay close to the skin”: Penhaligon's Sartorial, but also the very fougère-like Vétiver by Frédéric Haldimann tell stories about the sports jacket that men wear and thus – refer to objects of the closest personal area. Personally, I find it more than agreeable if a perfume that somebody wears at work refers only to himself, supports the persons presence and does not try to abduct my mind to the fresh seaside, a blossomed meadow or some opium den.

    Sometimes music and perfume are more welcome when they set a focus instead of leading astray.

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  4. Herzlich Willkommen, Apicius! It's wonderful to read you here! What a bounty of beautiful ideas you have brought with you.

    I agree with you that reviewers tend to reach for visual metaphors and images in describing their experience of a perfume. I wonder whether this might have much to do with the fact that we share much more visual than aural experience. Yes, we all can recognize familiar noises: traffic, trains, and planes; footsteps, laughter, chatter; the sound of birds, cats, squirrels, and rain. But we don't have as rich a vocabulary with which to convey them. We also cannot assume much overlap when it comes to music, given the many different genres and the levels of sophistication of various listeners even within a given genre.

    This problem reminds me a bit of films which have literary precedents familiar only to a tiny fraction of filmgoers. To take an example at least tangentially relevant ((-;) Consider the film "Perfume: Story of a Murderer". I have not read Patrick Susskind's book, Das Parfum (though I own it, and if I ever locate it in my house, I intend to read it...), but I have seen the film.

    Discussions of the film in various fragrance communities invariably culminate in readers of the book stepping forward to critique the film relative to the book (which nearly everyone seems to agree is much better than the film). Yet there is a straightforward experience of the film, untutored by the book, which seems to me perfectly valid. I'll probably post a review here at some point and open up the discussion, but I cannot decide whether I should read the book first or not.

    The question is: will my experience of the film pre-book be somehow invalidated post-book? It cannot really be a requirement for understanding the film that one have read the book, for the film is created as an independent work of art. I often wonder actually, whether the people best situated to evaluate a film are those who are ignorant of its literary precedents. I'm torn, actually. Although, it seems, on the one hand, that more information and education is obviously better, on the other hand, it can pervert our direct experience of a work. It's not only a problem with literary precedents; the same problem arises when films are re-made, and some but not other people have seen the previous version(s).

    Okay, so why is this relevant? Because, in the case of perfume, although the perfumer may have certain images and ideas in mind, the consumers of the perfume will likely have entirely different ones. It seems to me that the chasm between the perfumer's intentions and the wearers' receptions is incredibly vast, to the point where, although we could have, in theory, the analogue to program music, as you point out, in perfume, in reality, people do not seem to share enough of the relevant experiences to be able to appreciate the perfumer's intention.

    Instead, what I think that we have is more of the direct, untutored experience of perfumes, with the creators' intentions largely ignored, among other reasons because they are totally inaccessible. This relates to the “Intentional Fallacy”, according to which evaluations of a work of art cannot be dependent upon the creator's original intention, at the most basic level, because “ought implies can”. In order for it to be a requirement upon sound interpretation that the creator's intentions be taken into account, it must first be possible to access those intentions. But that seems impossible, both in theory and in practice.

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  5. Reply to Apicius, cont'd.

    Now, consider the case of the house of Histoires de Parfums, which named many of its original perfumes after literary figures. I think that the vast majority of people who wear those perfumes (which I love, by the way), have little, if any, experience of the work of the literary figures to whom they are said to relate. It's a bit like saying that this dot: . means God. Sure, you can claim whatever you like, but what you are saying has much more to do with you, than the object about which you claim to write.

    One of the things I love most about perfume, and in this it is similar to music as well, is that our experience of it is so direct, and therefore in some sense “honest”. To read other people's perfume reviews is a way of accessing their souls, because they generally (assuming that they are not shills...) have no reason whatsoever to lie when they praise a perfume as a masterpiece or condemn it as an unwearable piece of junk. I don't even care when they hate what I love, because I feel that they are sharing something about them which seems somehow intimate. There is sort of a primordial, pre-civilization reaction which people have to perfumes, as to music.

    Far from thinking that I would be better off knowing the perfumer's intentions, I actually would prefer not to have my experience of a perfume affected by any knowledge at all. I would love to be able to evaluate every perfume blind, and I often wonder whether reviews are not skewed by knowledge of the cost and provenance (house and perfumer), when a “sophisticated” perfumista finds ways to love a perfume which they believe that they are “supposed” to love, or claims to revile a perfume which they are “supposed” hate, given its lowly, ignoble origins, etc.

    In some ways, I feel that the notion of an “absolute” perfume can only be relative. I think that for people ignorant of perfumery, their experience, ironically enough, may be as “absolute” as an experience can be. It's when we start learning more and more about the world of perfume and perfumery that we lose the ability to perceive perfume directly as a thing in and of itself. Instead, everything relates back to something else in infinitely many recursive ways.

    Well, this is all starting to sound a bit Rousseau-esque, so let me wrap this up by thanking you so much for your thought-provoking comments on the connections between music and perfume! Please return again soon!

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  6. Approached from a strictly physiological perspective, perfume and music are indeed more similar than perfume is to the other art forms you've discussed, poetry and visual art.

    Unlike poems, perfumes and music produce actual physical sensations (smelling and hearing), and unlike visual art, which also produces a sensation (seeing), what is sensed occurs and develops over time. It is not immediate, but an unfolding series of sensations.

    Also, in the case of poetry, a persons experience of that poem is a mental process involving intellect and emotion. You can't experince a poem without thinking. Conversely, the actual experince of smell and sound is pure sensation. You don't have to use your intellect to experience it. In this way, how a person reacts to perfume or music can seem more primitive and instinctual.

    I was also thinking of the differences between perfume and other art forms in a way that sort of relates to the Tower of Babel discussion. It has to do with how people can or can't share the experience of smell, sound and sight.

    If you think about it, it is impossible to share the exact same experience of smell unless you occupy the same space and time as another person. It cannot be recorded and replayed in the way you can something that you see (art) or something that you hear (music).

    A musical event can be recorded, and someone else can listen to that recording at a another place and time and esentially hear the same thing you did in terms of the sound waves that hit their eardrums. It can also be replayed and analysed. Similarly, you can take a photograph of something, say a piece of artwork, and discuss it with someone who was not with you because the colors, shapes and lines have been captured so that you will both be seeing the same thing (the same image of course, not the actual object).

    You cannot do that with scent. You cannot bake a pie, and say to someone, " You have to smell this; here let me send you a recording. Take a smell when you have the chance." We don't have the technology to capture scent molecules in the way we can capture sound waves, light and colors.

    Maybe that's why we go to such lengths in perfume reviews to describe a scent, not just our impressions of it, but the scent itself. You wouldn't have to do that with a painting. Two people could look at an image of a painting and see the same thing. No one would have to say, "Well there is red there, and in the background hints of grey and white, with wispy green things over in the right hand corner." That would be ridiculous since the other person can just see that. You could take note of it and comment on it, but you wouldn't have to actually describe what you are seeing.

    Similarly with a recording of music. You wouldn't have to describe each note, you could just have the other person listen to the same recording and the exact same sound vibrations would hit their eardrums. You could have a discussion sbout a piece of music, even note by note if you wanted to, because, with recordings, you would both hear the same thing. You could also play it back. You could say "Did you here that?" and go back and play it again.

    You can't do that with perfume, once the moment is gone, it's gone. You can't capture the scent molecules and play them back to someone. You can't say, "There, there is where the vetiver comes out. Let me play it back to you. See, see?" Each experience with a perfume is singular, unable to be recorded and never to be shared at another time or place.

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  7. Good day, Njeb, and welcome back to the salon! Thank you so much for these insightful comments on some of the other differences and similarities between music and perfume.

    I've been thinking about your idea that music can be shared through a recording. I like your explanation of how we can experience essentially the same impingements on our receptors in the case of music, even when it is preserved at a different place and time. My skeptical question is: how do we really know that we are hearing the same thing?

    It's quite clear from the sometimes radically different things that reviewers say about perfumes that they really do not smell the same thing or, at the very least, they find different aspects of the same perfume to be salient. I wonder if that is not also true in the case of music, but because we don't tend to say much about it, we're not likely to discover this fact.

    Consider the experience of a five-part fugue by an untutored listener. Are they really hearing the same thing as an accomplished pianist? This example raises the possibility that the reason why different perfume reviewers focus on different aspects is that some of them are more experienced than others. In that case, the experience of the same perfume could, at least in theory, be shared as easily—or not—as a piece of music, but there would be different reactions to it based upon facts about the individual, not the perfume itself.

    However, I must confess that I myself find that explanation to be unpersuasive, because the words that two different perfume reviewers use tend to be fully comprehensible by everyone, and they tend to refer to scents—and sometimes scenes—to which we all can relate. It seems that some people simply do not perceive—or notice—some aspects of some perfumes. But, in addition, when we translate our experience of a perfume into an image captured in words, we are introducing meaning which derives only from our own own lives: the memories in our minds.

    It is nonetheless true, however, that when I read a review where someone claims that a dark floriental perfume is “just like Chanel no. 5,” then I become immediately convinced that the reviewer has very limited experience with perfume.

    So I guess that I'm torn: is the failure to grasp certain features of a perfume similar to not being able to tease out the distinct voices of a fugue—that is, purely a matter of lack of experience? Or are there physiological barriers in the case of perfume, which are compounded by entirely idiosyncratic factors relating to personal taste?

    It seems most likely to me that a large number of factors conspire simultaneously, which is the only way to make sense of the radical disagreements of opinion between, say, the creator of a perfume, and those who may decry it as a disaster. Whose opinion should we take more seriously? The perfumer, who knows the perfume intimately, or some outside person who issues a judgment about the perfume?

    The skeptical problem arises in all of the other arts as well, of course, but there seems to be much less convergence of opinion in the realm of perfume than in other realms, at least as far as I've seen. Consider the case of films. Although individual film reviewers may differ quite a lot about the quality and meaning of a film, when one looks at the “best of” lists written by seasoned film viewers, there is quite a bit of overlap. Great films tend to rise to the top, although there is certainly no unanimity even among professional film reviewers.

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  8. Reply to Njeb, cont'd

    All of that said, I do completely agree with you that scent is problematic in the sense that it cannot be captured and preserved, probably because the location and ambient conditions of the person experiencing it are much more important to olfactory than to aural or visual experience. Perhaps this is the primary reason why perfume has not been fully recognized as one of the established arts: it's all too ephemeral. We'll be taking up the question of the Osmothèque in an upcoming salon discussion, and I'll look forward to your thoughts on the matter!

    Thank you so much for sharing more of your profound ideas with us, Njeb!

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  9. 2 thoughts: First, yes, I think most definitely a persons experience with perfume will effect how they interpret it. The more experience a person has with perfume, the more they will be able to pick up nuances in a scent and make distinctions between different fragrances. I think most people are just not used to evaluating scent in a critical way and need to develop reference points and a vocabulary to share their impressions with others.

    People are much more accustomed to discussing music and, at least in the case of popular music, it is much more of a shared cultural experience. Many children have had at least some sort of musical education growing up, and it is a common teenage pastime to discuss music. Most of us come to perfume as total novices and as something we've never really thought about or dicussed critically. So, not only does it seem people experience scent differently, but we don't even have a common language with which to discuss it.

    Second, sound and a person's experience of it is a much easier thing to pin down than smell. It's fairly straightforward to evaluate a person's hearing, but how do you do that with smell? I know I have a better sense of smell than my husband, but is there some objective way to prove that in the way we can evaluate a person's hearing with a hearing test? It's hard to imagine with smell being so much more subjective. Also, with music you can experience it more directly, in a vacuum so to speak, with the use of headphones and such. As you said, scent is always more affected by the environment in which it is smelled.

    Perhaps these problems with evaluating scent could be overcome. I think it's just a matter of giving it attention. At this point though, I feel that smell is considered one of the lesser senses and one that is not commonly given much serious consideration.

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  10. Dearest Njeb,

    Yes, indeed, we do seem to be more aurally than olfactorily sensitive. Tovah and I were discussing this a bit in the comments at the end of Tower of Babel Exhibit A. I am struck especially by the difference in olfactory sensitivity between people and cats. The cats familiar to me have always appeared to be able to detect relevant scents in tiny quantities from very far away. Of course, we cannot know much about how fine-grained that sensitivity is: do they distinguish beef from lamb or fish? Or do they simply detect the presence of some form of edible food?

    I wonder whether it might be too late for human beings as a group, evolutionarily speaking, to develop more acute senses of olfaction. One of the major impediments would seem to be the jumble of smells which accost one in any urban setting. In order to function, we must filter out as irrelevant the vast majority of smells, just as we attend to only relevant visual stimuli and sounds.

    You mentioned that we are better at talking about music than about perfume. I wonder whether this is true. Usually when I hear people talking about music it does not go beyond exclamations of approval or disapproval. I have not heard a lot of sophisticated analysis of music, at least not by non-musicians...

    As far as testing olfactory sensitivity: this is actually done each year at the Concours de Nez in Grasse! I was there completely by accident one year and so tried my nose in the contest. What a disaster! My only hope for saving face was that my mistakes would be regarded as errors of translation. (-;

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  11. Haha, I would love to try my hand at that in Grasse. My guess is that it would be a total embarrassment, at least compared to more experienced noses :)

    I do agree that most people don't talk about music in a particularly sophisticated way, but I think most can at least distinguish between genres of music (ie. jazz, rock, classical, folk) and are familiar with some musical terms (notes, rhythms, bass, etc.) and musical instruments, whereas the elements that contribute to a perfume's composition are not as well known. I can't see any reason, though, that people couldn't discuss perfume in a similar way to music (there are indeed many parallels). I think it's mostly just a matter of experience and familiarity.

    Oh yes, and cats. I do think they distinguish between smells (at least smells that are relevant to them). NOTHING sends my cats scurrying to the kitchen faster than when I open a can of tuna. And then of course, there is catnip...

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  12. I'm certainly ready to go with the music analogy as well. Music is considerably less representational than paintings or poetry.

    While visual art can be as abstract as perfume, each person is assumed to take in the same initial set of visual information, while with perfume, it seems clear that there are large differences among various individuals when it comes to the sorts of initial perceptions that precede their interpretive processes.

    Granted the same things are entering each person's nose, but to continue the art analogy, with perfume (and speaking for others like myself who's noses may not be the best) it's as though each individual arrives on the scene with their own unique pattern of color-blindness - something that's probably not the common case when it comes to visual art. In both cases interpretation is involved, but unless we are dealing with persons who have various degrees of visual blindness, the initially received inputs when it comes to art are assumed to be the same, whereas with the sense of smell it's probably not fair to make that assumption at all.

    I suppose we could say the same about music, in that aside from those with severe hearing loss, all people are assumed to hear the same notes. But I believe that music is different than art in that unless you are someone who could visualize the musical notes in you head, music, like perfume, seems to be an interpretive experience right from the very start.

    Taking another tack, with poetry (assuming for the sake of argument that all people can read) and visual art, it's clear to the person experiencing it that there is "a thing" that exists, and which will continue to exist once we leave it's presence. A "thing" that bears some observational resemblance to the experience we had. Even before I hear a poem I can visualize the words residing in a book, and when I leave the museum, I can visualize the continued existence of the art piece.

    But where is smell, once it is gone ? And where is music ?

    Sure there's that clear juice, and thanks to the last 100 years of technology, there are CD's of music, but what sort of representational resemblance is there in those "things" to the experience we encountered ?

    Perhaps one day there will be a way to capture and store the raw essence of various human emotions, in ways that later others will be able to experience them at will.

    Whatever the storage mechanism turns out to be, I suspect it too will be akin to music and perfumes, in that the "thing" that contains the information for future retrieval will bare little or no logical resemblance to the nature of the experience itself.

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  13. Welcome back, Bob! Very nice to read your fascinating insights on this bright but bracing Sunday morning.

    I'm wondering about your idea that when you leave a museum, you can still visual a work of art, and when you close a book, you can visualize the words in it. I guess that I'm not sure what you're getting at. If anything, I'd say that my olfactory and aural memories are much stronger and more clear and distinct than my visual memories. Part of the reason for that may simply be that there are fewer of them—or at least fewer that we recognize as important enough to register as memories.

    The visual images which make up our experience are, at least potentially, infinitely many, since any period of time can be sliced into infinitely many “snapshots”, so to speak. This is part of the reason why the visual memories I have are quite a bit weaker, I think, than some of my olfactory and aural memories.

    I recall in a comment you made at another site that you brought up the example of a jingle in our heads which we cannot expel. This happens a lot to me. Some ridiculous pop lyric from decades ago—could be the Rolling Stones or any other number of bands—will pop up out of nowhere, perhaps prompted by an idea or another memory. It's not the words that are important, I think, but the music which hooks them into my mind as nearly permanent features of my memory bank—though they have nothing to do with me personally!

    And then of course there are linked memories. I have a difficult time thinking about certain pieces of music without thinking about the films in which they were extremely important. Kubrick used Schubert (Piano trio in E-flat, Opus 100) in Barry Lyndon and Beethoven (the Ninth Symphony) in A Clockwork Orange in ways which verily appropriated the music, linking it irrevocably in my mind to those films. Because I have limited experience with zither music, I always think of Anton Karas' score for Carol Reed's The Third Man whenever I think of the film.

    The same holds true for distinct olfactory memories. Whenever I smell the diesel exhaust of a bus, I think of Los Angeles, because I used to ride a bike to work when I lived there and often inhaled the smell as a result. The constellations of visual memories of that city which might pop up are probably different every time, but they are all linked in my mind by that smell.

    Many people associate the scents of various foods which they enjoyed at certain places (or at an earlier time, such as in childhood) with very powerful and vivid images. And then, of course, there are always our memories of those unforgettable people who overperfumed themselves with this or that iconic scent...

    So my point is that, when you say “Where is music, once it is gone? and where is music?” I think that the answer is this: in exactly the same place as the visual images which you may have retained. Apicius mentioned in a comment above that perfumes refer to objects in our imagination, and I think that that is just right. The objects are just as real as objects in the outside world, but these ones inhabit our minds.

    I definitely agree with you about the powerful emotions tied up with olfactory and aural experience. Both perfume and music seem somehow closer to primal emotion than poetry. Njeb made this point above, too, that you don't have to exercise your intellect in the case of scent.

    Of course, the more we know, the more we do begin to process our experience intellectually. Maybe we have an initial “untutored” experience, but then our minds begin acting up it, analyzing it and seeking out connections to other things and ideas.

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  14. *Answering you question* : Nope I did not :)

    Music is "always" in my head: I am humming, singing, tapping, thinking music almost every minute I am awake. Unconsciously. Other people then point out to me that I do ;) And on some moments I like to sing out loud. (I am not quiet when I ride my bike LOL )
    Music is there when I speak, walk and listen and think.

    Perfume is my silent companion. Who reaches my soul in a very different way.

    The link to memories is there, but in a totally different way.

    When I hear music I "see" situations in my head, visual. Stories almost.
    Perfume evokes emotions, no visuals, or maybe a small very intense moment like crying in my mothers lap and sniffing her perfume. A "Still" of my life.

    I can recall a song, I can not recall a perfume. I can remember a perfume, I can dream of it, I can almost feel it... but it has no frame, no boundaries. Music has to me.

    I can link a perfume to a song and vise versa.
    But to me they both have very different roles of impact on my life.

    HUG Guusje

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    1. Dear Guusje,

      Thank you so much for sharing your divergent experiences of music and perfume. FASCINATING that you associate visual images with music but not with perfume. In my case, they both evoke memories, and those memories are often visual, albeit sometimes rather vague. In fact, I believe that my scent-induced memories (usually of places or people) are MORE visual than my music-induced memories, which tend to be more emotional.

      Of course there exceptions, as I mentioned in a comment above: sometimes music becomes linked with films, for example, and in those cases the memories are very clear and crisp, not foggy conjurings of the distant past.

      Writing about music seems much more difficult to me than writing about perfume, for some reason. I have always felt that music is the highest art form, which defies any attempt to describe or capture it adequately. Part of the reason would seem to be the non-representational aspect of music, but there must be some other reason, since perfume is non-representational, too!

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  15. With music there are much references to make: a rhythm can be like a heartbeat, or the cadans of a train or truck (even the deaf can relate to that) -or ... *enter an endless line of examples*... It even has something mathematical. There are boundaries that one can explain and relate to (notes: high and low and so on). So writing about music can be learned and the emotions that music evokes all people can relate too.
    Ofcause there are personal memories that can give music that extra dimension, but blues tend to evoke other emotions than trance music... and that is kind of global.

    Perfume, to me, is way more personal, an inner journey along memories, emotions and subtle mood changes.
    The notes can be given, but the nuances, that music-notes and notations give are very clear, those nuances are not available with perfume.
    Not all roses smell like rose, then you have the different rose species, the early roses, the candied ones... an abundance of nuances that are hardly to be captured in words.
    This is why I do not review: I can not find the words. I can say some blunt obvious things... but that is it. In music "loud" can be captured in decibel, in perfume "loud" can mean a lot of things... and even that is so personal... to me Killian's perfumes are loud, other people find them very pleasing and not loud at all...

    Hence... you can guess what I am getting at ... I admire people who can ;)

    Guusje

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    1. Guusje, Darling: Well, you've pretty much torn my new little theory to shreds!!!! It's funny because your experience is basically the opposite of mine. What is especially fascinating is that both of us are musicians, so this shows that even people with similar backgrounds (trained in classical music) may think of music in entirely different terms!

      Thank you so much for illuminating the errors in my ways! I think that while our individual experiences of music are quite different, they are equally valid, so this shows that my theory is false! (-;

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  16. Well I'm going to be the odd one out here, I think the subconscious desires transport and whether that transport comes through music, poetry, adrenaline, perfume, spirituality, love, sex, dance or any other part of humnan experience. How we get there is unique and individual to each of us as is our experience of life. How we explain it can be interesting of itself but without the transport the reference has only dry words. Joy is joy, if you find it be grateful. If one persons love of music or poetry finds analogies in scent then good for them.

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  17. Dear dacha,

    I don't really read you as the "odd one out". Guusje, for example, flatly rejected the analogy of perfume to music, explaining how it did not capture her own experience at all. In other words, it would seem that she agrees with you when you say:

    "How we get there is unique and individual to each of us as is our experience of life."

    You are pointing to yet another profound idea (just as deep as your remark on the skin chemistry post...), that there are words, and then there are things. We try to tie them together, but we never really succeed.

    One of my very first perfume reviews ever was of Lanvin Arpège. Here's the sum total of what I wrote:

    "Ineffably beautiful."

    So you see: you're not alone at all! (-;

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