The Australian Art Quartet aims to appeal to an audience’s sense of sound and smell with help from a leading perfumier.

Have you even wondered what Tchaikovsky’s music would smell like? Or wished to sample the unique bouquet of Arvo Pärt? The Australian Art Quartet is giving audiences the chance to smell the music in a synesthetic concert experience, Scent of Memory, in which fragrance designer Carlos Huber will augment the quartet’s playing with an olfactory experience. “I’ve been fascinated by scent for a long time,” the AAQ’s Artistic Director and cellist James Beck told Limelight, “especially its ability to go straight to the heart and make otherwise faintly recalled experiences fresh again.”

It was this deeply affecting power of scent on the mind – in many ways similar to that of music – that inspired the AAQ’s innovative performance project. “The Patrick Süskind novel Perfume was on the bedside table of the western world in the 1990s and I was no exception,” said Beck, “so the idea that a scent can motivate, control or excite beyond rational thought has become part of a collective consciousness. But no one (to my knowledge) has explored how this could interplay with another...