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SCENT OPERA Where Sound & Scent Align

A fragrances composition of top, middle and base notes is comparable to the composition of a song. Each scent note can be attributed to a single chord within a harmony of sound, like patchouli as a base note bringing depth to a top note of rich jasmine.

A group of sound and scent aficionados took this concept one step further this past summer with the creation of Green Aria: A Scent Opera, where not only are single fragrance notes like chords of a song, but full scents become audio characters. There is no script to Green Aria, spoken or sung. Instead the show tells the tale of the struggle of nature versus technology and sings the gospel of modernism through scents that sound, touch and pour.

Seats in NYCs Guggenheim Museum theatre were equipped with scent microphones, set up to release 23 scents from magma and steel, to fire and earth- at various intervals during the 30 minute show. Unscented bursts of air were released between fragrances, in order to clear audience noses for the next incoming whiff. I had the opportunity to witness this limited time phenomenon.

As the lights of the theatre dimmed, people grabbed fervently at their scent tubes; teenagers attempted to stick them into inappropriate places on each other. The aria began with an introduction of its five elements and eighteen supporting characters for whom each name was projected on a video screen while their music and fragrance blared from speaker and tube. We met the likes of Absolute Zero, Runaway Crunchy Green and Shiny Steel; Fire + Smoke was introduced alongside crinkling electronic sounds and the piercing scent of burnt ash. In a comedic twist, it was announced that character Fresh Air had become indisposed and since there is no replacement of such to be found in smoggy NYC, the character Clean Air would have to come stand in his place. Clean Air came equipped with soft, wistful melodies and a bracing, clinically pure scent like a freshly scrubbed doctors office.

Throughout the next 30 minutes, the audience in the nearly purely dark theatre were treated to an abstract, dramatic show of sound and light and scent, eclectic music flowing seamlessly from one scene and concept to the next, fragrances timed to escort your mind through the audio storyboard. At the end of the show, the characters took the usual curtain call, their names flashing on the video screens and scents pumping through the microphones one last time. The loudest ovation went to the faintly sulphurous, aptly named Funky Green Impostor.

The Scent Opera is the result of a two-year collaboration between writer and director Stewart Matthew, composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson, and French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel (who has created fragrances for Ralph Lauren and Este Lauder). Matthew and Laudamiel work together as Aeosphere LLC, an enterprise exploring scent technology that they call a perfume media company.

Perfumery should be the same kind of discipline as music or visual art, Laudamiel told The Wall Street Journal. You need that kind of nurturing of crazy ideas.

Unlike the grand failing of 1960s Smell-o-Vision technology and the more recent attempt at a USB device called the iSmell (named one of the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time by PC World), Green Aria: A Scent Opera successfully takes perfumery across artistic barriers to create something new, fresh and multi-platformed.

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