


Smells like Beethoven

Using the word “note” to describe an odour may be more than just metaphor

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Could this phenomenon perhaps be linked to very primal features, as well as subconscious characteristics like intuitive memory ?

What we seem to notice is an equivalence between sweet/sour/small/light/high-pitched=child on one side and large/heavy/dark/bitter/low-pitched=adult on the other.

This would make sense if you consider that taste buds change over a lifetime (sweetness and glucose intake are favored during youth, bitterness during adulthood) and that the size/age of an animal generally determines the pitch of its cry. The smell of wood or smoke could then also be associated to adulthood (adults smoking, or old houses that smell of wood and grandparents).
These associations between perceptions would then unconsciously be made in broad regions of our memory, and help explain the statistical prevalence of some types of syneasthesia.

I'll let researchers take up on this hypothesis if anyone ever reads this and deems it reasonable enough.

Simone 555

Better than smelling like teen spirit...?

Seriously, as a Lexico-gustatory synasthete, I was delighted to see this article, emailed to me by fellow GGS, James Wannerton.

It's really encouraging to see synasthesia popping up its many-headed presence far more frequently than in the past.


There's a difference between making associations between different senses (as everyone does, and as this study has shown) and synesthesia, which is actually experiencing the secondary sense. Synesthesia is actually no fun to have at all. I know this as I've met quite a few because it's a research specialty at my university.

As much as I love this magazine, the science journalism can be a little off, to my ears.

MagdaleneA in reply to CallumC

Hello Callum -- I was surprised to read your post, as I am a synesthete and I find it enriches my world. And makes things much easier to remember. If I try to recall someone's name, a place, etc, the first thing that always comes to me is what color the word is. If I still can't remember, I just need to scroll through options of the right color. I have three orange letters, for example, so if I know an acquaintance has an orange name, I go through the Fs, Ns and Ws: Fred? Nick? Till I realize that their name is Wilfred. I would never give up this ability, which creates an additional way in which to perceive beauty. I'm sorry for the people participating in your study, but their experience is certainly unlike mine.


This is such a cool topic to research! The only thing I didn't understand (although, maybe I just need more coffee)is why the writer touched briefly on synaesthesia, even though the volunteers were not identified as synaesthestes... I'm particularly interested because I am a synaesthete myself, although I didn't realize it until I started reading up on it. I just thought everyone else hiding their weirdness, too.

Connect The Dots

What is moist, brown and sits on a piano bench?

Answer: Beethoven's last movement.

Smell the music. Cheers.

Actually the question should be 'What is moist, brown and sits under a piano bench?' Beethoven was so focused he didn't wnat to break his train of thought by leaving the room so he just pushed the bench out of the way and blew a wind movement into the chamber pot.


Don't forget that for decades in movies and TV, tastes, colours, landscapes and sizes have been portrayed by filmakers with accompanied music. Paul Bunyan cut down Douglas Fir to the sounds of low pitched Orchestral throbbing chords. Butterflies and honeybees flit from flower to flower to piccolos and high pitches. Tiny Tim tiptoed thru tulips, not skunk cabbage. The sun rises to Morning Mood. The larger the animal, the lower the pitch of the sound used to portray it. Interplay between sense may be more a function of media protrayal than anything else.


Well Tempered Cuisine

There is a coherent reason why sound is organized by pitch: the principle of self similarity of ascending or descending musical scales. When musical voices are in dialogue or counterpoint, harmonic complexities result. A creative composition seeks to resolve ambiguities or ironies among such voices provoking an audience to relive the process of the creation of the musical piece.

There is a likewise in cuisine a range or palette of sights, tastes, textures, and smells which are well demonstrated. A beautiful composition in cuisine plays off successfully juxtaposing and resolving the ironies among the taste buds, textures, sights, temperatures, and smells. The guest at a dinner thus relives the creativity of the chef.

Thus there are great recipes just as there are great musical scores. But the performance is the thing...


interesting but well known fact.
The same wine tasted by a group of experienced wine tasters is graded differently (as told by a famous french wine producer) depending to the varying musical environments.
Pierre Vansteenkiste- Belgium


Considering sensory receptors are located in the brain, and they may "share" or "overlap" a particular area in the brain, the findings seem not at all surprising. I speak here from a crude knowledge of the research data that are rapidly emerging from the field of neuroscience.


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