“ Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain degrees. There is, as it were, an octave of colors like an octave in music; certain odors coincide, like the keys of an instrument. Such as almond, vanilla and orange blossom blend together, each producing different degrees of a nearly similar expression” - Septimus Piesse”
Septimus Piesse created the concept of merging scent and sound in the brain. He was responsible for the highly informative The Art of Perfumery, and he identified odor molecules as having particular notes associated with them. This was the origin of the perfume industry"s use of musical terminology when describing odors (note etc.). In what he described as an Odophone, he compared sharp, attention grabbing scents with higher pitched notes and heavy scents with lower notes (think dark, heavy bass.)
The Odophone.—The late Dr Septimus Piesse endeavoured to show that a certain scale or gamut existed amongst odours as amongst sounds, taking the sharp smells to correspond with high notes and the heavy smells with low. He illustrated the idea by classifying some fifty odours in this manner, making each to correspond with a certain note, one-half in each clef, and extending above and below the lines. For example, treble clef note E (4th space) corresponds with Portugal (orange), note D (1st space below clef) with violet, note F (4th space above clef) with ambergris. It is readily noticed in practice that ambergris is much sharper in smell (higher) than violet, while Portugal is intermediate. He asserted that properly to constitute a bouquet the odours to be taken should correspond in the gamut like the notes of a musical chord,—one false note among the odours as among the music destroying the harmony. Thus on his odophone, santal, geranium, acacia, orange-flower, camphor, corresponding with C (bass 2d line below), C (bass 2d space), E (treble 1st line), G (treble 2d line), C (treble 3d space), constitute the bouquet of chord C.
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