Not Even Wrong by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins [Collins, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596917491
Goodreads: 9643062
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

An entirely new organ has been developed, which instead of inspiring and thrilling audiences by sound, translates music into corresponding odors … atomizers are actuated by keys on the piano. Pressure upon any of these keys activates a circuit, which operates a solenoid, or suction type magnet, the latter releasing a valve and permitting compressed air from an air compressor and storage tank to blow the odorous vapour upward.

Like the carefully placed speakers in modern cinema, the concert hall positioned rotary fans to give the audience surround-smell. Between songs, ionizers wafted out a palate-cleansing breeze of ozone.

The smell organ was only the latest in a long line of similar instruments. The Jesuit scientist Louis Castel compared sound and color in the great color theory work of the eighteenth century, Optics of Colors’, to press the point home, he invented an “ocular harpsichord” strung with colored ribbons in the place of wire. By the early 1900s, both the British art professor A. M. Rimington and the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin were independently building and playing, respectively, the colour organ and the chromola. Rimington’s used massive arc lights to shoot out thirteen-thousand-candlepower beams, their colors corresponding to the notes pressed. Perhaps a few in the audience, bathed in the full spectrum of the colour organ, had their senses transported even further. After all, Francis Bacon had noted three centuries earlier that rainbows smell.

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