Scent and sound have always had a close kinship. They share a vocabulary, like top notes, base notes, and accords, but they also share a neurological component. The nose and ears contain a tissue called epithelium, a sponge-like structure of nerves where olfactory or auditory receptors sit. Once they receive sound vibrations or scent molecules, they send electrical impulses to the limbic system of the brain, which contains the amygdala and hippocampus, also known as the seats of emotion and memory.
In the past, brands like Øthers and Inara have explored the wellness benefits of fusing meditative sound and scent. But the scent marketing industry is predicted to reach $3.2 billion by 2033, as a growing number of fragrance brands and creatives stage events that tap into these sensory narratives even further.
One of the earliest and most defining “scent concerts” was staged in 1902 by poet and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann in New York. Entitled “A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes,” it was cut short after four minutes due to audience jeering. The Institute for Art and Olfaction reattempted Hartmann’s efforts in January 2014, with much better results, not only due to technological advances but also to an emerging desire to explore the vast potential of scent beyond its bottled confines. In a similar feat, the organization will stage a multisensory lecture with psychiatrist and scholar J.W. Dotson this May. The event will combine scents, colored lenses, and smartphone-generated musical tones based on British occultist Roland Hunt’s color healing modules. According to a 2023 VML survey, 61% of respondents want brands to help them feel intense emotions, and in that regard, scent and sound activations deliver an especially potent effect.
Another example of these modern-day sensory seekers is the Icelandic art collective and fragrance house Fischersund. Three of its founders (Jónsi Birgisson of Sigur Rós, Sindri Már Sigfússon of Seabear, and Kjartan Holm of For a Minor Reflection) are musicians, and Birgisson's music studio was transformed into the company's headquarters in the heart of Reykjavik. The trio composes original music that they say "vibrates" at the same frequency as the brand's perfume accords.
Fischersund, which has over 100 retail partners worldwide, including Goop and Violet Grey, staged a scent concert last June in Copenhagen at 3DaysofDesign. In March of this year, the brand performed a four-part scented concert at Dover Street Market during Paris Fashion Week to herald the arrival of its Faux Flora No. 1 (Birth) creation: a bergamot, cream, and white musk blend evoking the first of five stages in a plant's (or human's) life cycle. Visitors were asked to spray themselves with the fragrance before projections of moving nature images appeared on the walls, along with live readings of Icelandic and English prose. Additional elements included a scented flower sculpture, incense burning, servings of Icelandic herbal schnapps, and scent diffusions representing the stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and death.
"Because this collection is about the intangible essence of germination and life, we felt that a traditional retail launch wouldn't suffice. We needed a medium that could breathe life into these 'invented' botanicals," co-founder Lilja Birgisdóttir told BeautyMatter. "A scented concert allows us to present the fragrance as part of a 50-minute sensory narrative, making the debut of the scent an emotional experience rather than just a product reveal."
She draws parallels between scent and sound being invisible languages that move through the air, often triggering memory. "The music provides the emotional structure, while the live-diffused scent provides the atmosphere, creating a 3D visual and olfactive journey," she says. "In an era of digital noise, people are craving authentic, visceral, in-person experiences. A nonauditory event might show you a bottle, but a scented concert leaves an emotional imprint that transcends the physical space. It builds a community of kindred spirits who have shared a specific, unrepeatable moment. This creates a 'cult following' because we create a core memory, versus just a seller of goods."
Another fragrance house looking to deepen its following is Diptyque. In March, the brand launched its new Orphéon eau de toilette, a juniper and cedar scent named after its founders' favorite jazz bar in Paris, alongside a collaboration with jazz quintet Ezra Collective and music discovery platform ColorsxStudios. The quintet released an exclusive version of its "Enter the Jungle" track for the brand, while Diptyque staged an in-store activation at its New Bond Street flagship in London with music store Superfly Records, fusing scent and sound to recreate the atmosphere of its eponymous inspiration.
Amanda Morgan, Managing Director of Diptyque UK, describes the partnership as a natural collaboration. "At Diptyque, it is always about the journey and combining olfactory with audio helps to guide customers in for their own memories with our fragrances," she says. "From the three founders of Diptyque, our values have always been about arts, exploration, and stories. We only anticipate more exciting and elevated ways to continue this journey."
It was not the brand's first foray into this territory: In February 2025, as part of its worldwide traveling pop-up experience, Diptyque opened a jazz bar for two nights in New York’s SoHo neighborhood for the launch of a limited edition of the Orphéum eau de parfum. Said product went on to become the brand’s top-selling scent, with an estimated $57 million in global sales; it’s certainly proving to be a popular tune.
While visitors delight in the wonders of sight, scent, sound (and sometimes taste), the challenge of producing these events is not merely conceptual, but logistical. It’s a challenge that business developer Clément Mercet and perfumer Ugo Charron, the co-founders of the multisensory show “Cosmic Gardens,” regularly embrace wholeheartedly.
"The idea was to move beyond the traditional concert format and create environments rather than performances. Instead of simply listening to music, audiences are invited to enter a sensory landscape where sound compositions and aromatic accords evolve together over time," they told BeautyMatter.
Mercet and Charron describe the coordination as requiring "careful orchestration, because each medium behaves very differently in space and time." Sound composition and acoustics travel with precision; scent moves slowly and organically, shaped by airflow, temperature, and architecture. "Sometimes the music leads and the scent subtly expands the atmosphere; other times the fragrance becomes the narrative element guiding the sonic journey," they explained.
Maxwell Williams has been staging scent raves for the past decade under their brand UFO Parfums. The mechanics began modestly with Williams tying scented nylon pantyhose to the front of a fan before expanding to commercial scent diffusers capable of covering an entire 5,000-square-foot space. They have since expanded to collaborative events, including Liquadora with DJ Python and Sustain-Release with Aurora Halal, international editions in Portugal and Lisbon, plus stateside shows at institutions including The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. Visitor numbers have ranged up to several hundred. For Liquadora, they diffused UFO Parfums x DJ Python’s Angel, a leather scent with ambergris, incense, and jasmine. An event held at a sex club in Lisbon featured an animalic composition with civet, hyraceum, and indole. And for those wanting to take the experience home, Williams created a signature scent for the ARC Music Festival in Chicago.
Getting the intensity right is an intuitive process."Part of it is making sure that the scent is legible," Williams adds. "People don't really have a language or the ability to understand what they're smelling a lot of the time, especially if it's not something as recognizable as florals." While this vocabulary gap and the subjectivity of perceiving scents (not to mention olfactory sensitivities) can be one of the biggest challenges to scent events, it’s also what makes audience members stop and smell the music.
Joseph Quartana approached this challenge from the opposite direction, not translating scent into sound, but sound into scent. His subject was John Cage's 1952 experimental composition 4'33". In July 2019, Mute Records released a limited-edition STUMM433 vinyl box set with only 433 copies released, featuring over 50 interpretations of the track by artists including Depeche Mode, as part of the label's 40th anniversary series. "As soon as I read about the release of STUMM433, I had an instant flash of insight for what it should smell like," Quartana told BeautyMatter. "As the ever-practical American, I believe John Cage was meditating on what the ideal time is for a pause in a live music performance, allowing enough time to pass to process what one just experienced, and building anticipation for it to resume without delaying too long as to lose the crowd's interest. I designed the candle and packaging to reflect this pause, meditation, and yearning for the music to resume."
Working with perfumer Marcela Olalde de Castillo, Quartana created a candle called "4'33" The Scent of Silence," built on notes of ozone, musk, salt, and cedarwood, accented with black pepper, bergamot, and pimento oil. He describes the result as "an old Shakespearean wooden theater that just witnessed a performance so exhilarating, so inspirational that it singed the very atmosphere and wooden seats." The packaging evokes an audio experience, with black mesh elements resembling speakers. At the launch party, the candle was burned for the duration of Mute’s founder Daniel Miller's cover of the track.
"It was magic; the room filled with the scent as the silence carried for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Short of the atmospheric hiss of the track's silent white noise and minimal crowd chatter, it was still and quite beautiful to behold," Quartana recalls. "For me, sound and scent design is identical: notes, chords, mix-downs, visual material—same process. Start with a harmonic vision, arrange it with notes and chords and visuals/audio. I come from a history of musicians in my family line, so it's a natural extension for someone with natural synaesthesia like me." He has since created soundtracked films for four launches under his Quartana brand, scenting spaces with a proprietary diffusion system he developed nearly a decade ago.
Taking a moment (or hour) to soak in the scented glory of these events goes beyond a mere impression, however magical. "Your brain actually can't experience both of them at the same time. It's called neuroanatomical segregation. It only happens with scent and sound," Williams explains. And in an age of information overload, stripping our senses back to a singular experience at a time is (pun not intended) a breath of fresh air.
"I think folks are over virtual reality and want to get out into the real world again for true, visceral stimulation," Quartana adds. Williams frames their scent raves less as brand marketing and more as community building, remaining deliberately resistant to scale, noting, "I'm a practitioner of slow growth to no growth. I'm also kind of allergic to branding anything in the underground space." Williams ultimately hopes to see scent raves becoming a regular occurrence in every city, but on their own local terms. It’s an ongoing tension between underground exclusivity and broadening audiences, where strong desire and engagement is undeniably there, but spray one too many times and risk losing the special spritz. It is where intentionality, variety, and authenticity make all the difference.
"When scent is combined with sound, it can anchor an experience in the body—visitors don't just remember what they saw, they remember how the moment felt," Charron and Mercet state. "For brands and cultural institutions, this opens a powerful avenue for connection. Rather than simply presenting a product or message, a multisensory activation allows audiences to inhabit a world that reflects a brand's identity and values." The strong emotional response also leads to deeper engagement and word-of-mouth sharing.
"Scent and music are like the ultimate experiential expression," Williams says. "Especially if there isn't a bottle of that scent to be purchased, then you're just going to have to rely on your memory of that for the rest of your life."
For brands engaging in this space, the format offers cultural cachet and a powerful point of connection. Birgisdóttir sees scent concerts becoming more immersive and more frequent in the future, with another planned in Reykjavik on June 5, at this year’s Reykjavik Arts Festival. "As we expand, we want to continue pushing the boundaries of what a perfumery can be. We envision a future where these activations are not just events but essential cultural gatherings where guests from various fields—music, art, and fashion—collide to create something entirely new and inclusive."
Whether it's new diffusion technologies, movement-reactive soundscapes, or new scent molecules on the horizon, scent raves and concerts are only in their opening act, with the main show and encore offering even more opportunities to reconnect, discover, and engage.
