From Scented Concerts to Audiophile Perfumery: Decoding Fragrance’s Sonic Shift

What lives in the air for a limited time, then vanishes?

Perfume, of course. And music, too. Perhaps that’s why they’re now coming together in unexpected ways, from scented concerts to perfume stores with killer sound systems.

“They are so powerful if they manage to touch you,” says Pierre Guguen founder of the L’Orchestre de Parfum brand, of fragrance and music. “They have the same life. That is why you can blend them together.”

At a time when consumers increasingly crave unique experiences, pioneering perfume-makers are letting the ears join the nose. Here is a roundup of notable scent-and-sound mash-ups.

Francis Kurkdjian

Before becoming a perfumer, Francis Kurkdjian was a piano player from a young age and came from a musical family. Music was an important element when he danced ballet, as well. “Music is truly part of my DNA,” he says. Over the years, Kurkdjian has collaborated with musicians and composers about how their arts could be mixed together. Most recently, Kurkdjian’s project “Playing With Fire,” at the Philharmonie de Paris, which ended on May 3, melded solo piano, augmented reality and fragrance. Late last year, at the Palais de Tokyo, in “Perfume, Sculpture of the Invisible,” the Baccarat Rouge 540 Édition Millésime fragrance was the centerpiece. “For that, we had the creation of a piece of music,” Kurkdjian says, referring to the work by David Chalmin. “The music was an important part of the experimentation, because it was remixes of the sounds of the Baccarat factory, sounds of whales under water, of many sounds.” Maison Francis Kurkdjian has a composer, Yannick Kalfayan, practically in-house. “It’s real creative ping-pong,” Kurkdjian says. Other musical-fragrance tie-ins have included one opera in Vienna, work with sister pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque, and a scented concert with conductor and cellist Klaus Mäkelä.

Fischersund

Fischersund, the Icelandic art collective and perfumery brand, keeps staging its scented concerts around the globe. In March, it held one in Paris, at Dover Street Market — an immersive, multisensory happening put on by the brand’s founding family, including the siblings Ingibjörg, Sigurrós and Lilja Birgisdottir and Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson, and their partners. “Our aim is to touch all the senses with our work,” says Lilja Birgisdottir. “We love putting on scented concerts, where we get to connect music, scent and art.” In Paris, each concertgoer was given a 5-ml. vial of the brand’s Faux Flora No. 1 fragrance. Birgisdottir asked people to spray it on themselves to begin the scented journey. A fragrant flower sculpture was walked around the room and incense burned at another time. Fischersund’s scented concerts started in 2023 in New York, followed by Cork, Ireland; Seattle, Wash., and Copenhagen. The first such event in the brand’s hometown of Reykjavik will take place on June 5.

L’Orchestre Parfum

Guguen operates what he calls the first “audiophile perfumery” in Paris’ Marais district. The boutique, lined with dark wood and concrete, is chockablock with fragrance and sound systems. “It’s a place where we wanted to propose the quintessence of the experience of L’Orchestre Parfum,” he says. That is: smelling and listening to fragrances. Guguen’s life is infused with both music and perfumes, having played in bands and worked in the fragrance industry for decades. Guguen has long been fascinated by the two universes that he blended on stage to make “musical perfume.” Further mixing his two savoir-faires, Guguen launched the L’Orchestre Parfum brand eight years ago. For each of its fragrances, a perfumer creates an olfactory frequency related to a memory Guguen has. The fragrance is then given to a musician to be turned into a song. Boutique-goers take in the beats reminiscent of Seville, Spain; New York, and the Appalachia mountains. People purchasing a scent in the audiophile perfumery are offered a vinyl record with the olfactory-related compositions. Everyone has access to such songs and other playlists online.

Diptyque

Diptyque’s founders, Christiane Gautrot, Desmond Knox-Leet and Yves Coueslant, were multidisciplinary artists, connected to emotion and culture at large. Their fragrances were always concocted around a storyline. The eau parfum Orphéon, from 2021, took its name and inspiration from the jazz club — where there were creative conversations and music — adjacent to Diptyque’s flagship on Paris’ Boulevard Saint-Germain in the 1960s. Starting in January 2025, the house introduced a jazz club pop-up in New York, which then globetrotted to Japan and China. This year, the Orphéon eau de toilette was introduced. “We wanted to do something in Paris,” says Nathalie Chopra, chief brand officer at Diptyque. “We did a club for three nights next to Arts et Métiers. That was very much about listening to the music, recreating the ambience.” In the Paris flagship and in Diptyque’s London New Bond Street location, it created an experience around jazz and a curation of vinyl records, with listening stations. “It’s a way for us to reconnect with the atmosphere of the fragrance,” Chopra says.

Emma McCormick Goodhart

Artist Emma McCormick Goodhart immersed herself in archaeoacoustics, the study of sound in archaeological contexts, like caves. “Caves are also microclimates themselves,” McCormick Goodhart says. “I love the ways in which, when working with sound and scent in more neutral or artificial spaces, like galleries, once can make proto climates or climate fictions by atomizing them in tandem.” She has created scent-based installations using the olfactive register of wet earth or cut grass emitted through mists in moistened galleries. “That changed the way that acoustic propagates, too,” McCormick Goodhart says. She is fascinated by the interrelation of sound and fragrance when co-diffused — or broadcast — through space. For the Nottingham Contemporary museum, McCormick Goodhart proposed a scent climate, which became the first iteration of her cave-based scent. With Jessika Kenney, she created “Aeramphore (climate remix),” based on geo utterances — think a cave molting its voice — for a multichannel sound installation. McCormick Goodhart conceived a “scent climate,” called Exuviae, with perfume designer Barnabé Fillion and his Arpa Studios. Earth from caves, including geological moonmilks, helped fashion the creation. McCormick Goodhart’s first fragrance, Cave 0, was released by Ecdysis. Another scent followed in April.