What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert

Author:Avery Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307449306
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-11-22T10:00:00+00:00

A Night at the Opera

Early in 1993, I received a letter from Roland Tec, director of the New Opera Theatre Ensemble of Boston. Tec was producing a new work called Blind Trust, a boy-meets-blind-girl story with an improvised score and script. The production was to take place entirely in the dark, with scenes to be accompanied by scent to give a sense of place. Could I help them do this?

I convinced my boss at Givaudan-Roure Fragrances that this was an interesting creative challenge, one that would shower the company with free publicity and position us as a patron of the arts. Blind Trust became an official project, and we started designing atmospheres for a pizza parlor, a flower shop, a laundry, and a movie theater. Some of the fragrance development was easy—the flower shop required only a basic floral bouquet formulation with an exaggerated “green” note to suggest stems and leaves. We already had an excellent freshly-pressed-linen accord for the laundry. Pizza and buttered popcorn required extra effort—I crossed corporate boundaries and called the flavor division for help.

With initial fragrance formulations in hand, the next step was to adjust them so they smelled right in a big air space. This is not a concern for fragrance worn on skin, but it’s a critical step in developing an air-freshener scent. An oil that smells good on a piece of blotter paper takes on an entirely different character when it fills a room via aerosol or scented candle. The fragrance may “fall apart”: one component overwhelms the others, or is lost entirely. To get a sense of how a fragrance will smell in actual use, we test them in small rooms or, in our case, stainless-steel booths.

Within a week or so I was conducting informal scent-booth evaluations of the Blind Trust fragrances. Our staff, usually called on to rate the next “Country Meadow” air freshener, were amused to be judging pizza aroma. Still, their comments were useful (“more garlic,” “less basil,” “find a better cheese note”). When we tested the buttered-popcorn smell one afternoon, people wandered in from all over the building, asking who had microwaved the popcorn.

Blind Trust premiered in the planetarium of the Boston Science Museum on June 5, 1993. Tec’s artistic conception demanded that the audience experience everything as a blind person would—by ear or nose only. Instead of dimming the house lights, Tec plunged the room into complete blackness. Instead of a graceful word of welcome, he read aloud the program notes in their entirety. The music began and the singers stood next to the star-projector in the center of the room. Tec’s four odor-wranglers stealthily took up positions by the hall’s air inlets, located on the walls at head level. Armed with aerosol cans, they waited for their cues to start spraying. It was soon clear that even four cans at once were no match for the planetarium. Odors that were powerful in a living room seemed delicate in a hall this big. Also, the cues weren’t always well timed.

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