The smell of music Sound and vision are not the only senses that
work together – new studies show that even sound and smell can
form an unlikely pairing, writes Cassie Barton. This essay won
the General category in the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing
Prize. A few years ago, on work experience at Oxford
University’s psychology department, I found myself roped in to
participate in an experiment by a research team led by Professor
Charles Spence. Sitting in a tiny room in the warren of labs and
offices, I was shown a rack of bottles of scent and a simple
computer program that let me play the sound of musical
instruments at different pitches. My task was to sniff each of
the scents, and pick the sound that fitted best with each smell.
Puzzled, I inhaled my first sample – sweet and slightly sickly,
like bubble gum. Deep blaring brass seemed instinctively wrong,
so I tried out higher and purer sounds and eventually settled on
a high piano note. An hour later, I left not much the wiser
about what was going on. O