Making music or perfume - the connections between perfumery and music

With such similarities in formulation and language, the connections between perfumery and music are clear to see. And with Sarah’s music background, it's easy to understand why she feels the connection so strongly. I’m not sure there are many of us who hear the sounds of perfumery materials as Sarah does.

Here Sarah explains how the possibilities when composing a piece of music are similar to creating a fragrance, until they aren’t:

"For a beginner, perfumery can be instantly rewarding; if we choose the right one, we can bottle a material and wear it as a perfume. In that way it’s like learning to play the piano rather than the violin. Press one key, it hits the string for you and you’ve got a note. (With a violin in one hand and a bow in the other your first note ever is guaranteed to be horrendous.) Encouraged by your keyboard success, you could try two notes on the piano and as long as they aren’t too close together or too far apart, again you’ll produce something pleasing. With three, it can all start to go wrong; four or more and the likelihood of creating a good chord by chance drops. It is not a coincidence that perfume language talks about notes and accords (French for chords) and that the shelf system to store a materials collection is called an organ. Just as keyboard players need to learn how to make thousands of different chords, so do we. They only have 88 notes on a piano and ten fingers, and we have thousands of materials and unlimited lines in a formula. The number of terrible combinations available to us is mathematically infinite. Fortunately, the number of good combinations is infinite too."