Maxime Daniel Barbier

Research on music semantics has demonstrated the existence of a cognitive capacity to represent virtual sources of sounds, distinct from the capacity to represent sounds and sources of sounds. Our research explores a parallel phenomenon in the olfactory domain. The first contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that a smell can inform us about an entity — referred to as its virtual source — that is not causally tied to the characteristics of the smell. We exemplify two types of virtual sources of smells: some deriving from representations of smellscapes, some from representations of odor sources. The second contribution is an explanation of some practices of perfumery that intend to shape mental representations elicited by perfume smells, through their temporal structures and their constituent notes. The third contribution is a comparison between key features of the capacities to represent virtual sources of music and of smells. Three of those features are shared by both capacities: (1) only some of the properties of the stimulus are interpreted; (2) musical pieces and smells have an extremely underspecified semantics; (3) inferences may be about objects that are not able to produce the stimulus.