Daniel Sonabend is a London-based composer who specialises in creating music for scent.
Amongst his latest commissions was Cartier’s first Unidentified Scent Object – Le Nuage Parfumé (The Perfumed Cloud). The project was the brainchild of Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s in-house perfumer, who wants fragrance to be viewed differently.
The Perfumed Cloud was comprised of a tangible cloud scented with L’Envol de Cartier suspended in the middle of a large see-through glass cubical structure standing at the base of the Palais de Tokyo museum and Musée d’Art Moderne. The cloud was designed by climate engineers, Transsolar and the music played in the cube was Daniel's composition and completed the olfactory experience.
Alongside his olfactive work, Daniel has worked on scores for films such as Act/or (2015), Journey’s End (2017), Pin Cushion (2017) and Piano to Zanskar (2018). He has composed music for various art installations and advertising campaigns for clients such as Philips, The Macallan and The Royal Academy of Arts and regularly collaborates with vocalist Eliza Shaddad on electronicjazz duo SANDSCAPE
Yesterday, 1st June 2018 he released ‘Scent Constellation’, an album of 5 musical fragrance creations composed for a permanent installation of the same name at Le Grand Musèe du Parfum in Paris. The award winning installation, created by Jason Bruges Studio is a multisensorial art piece in which Sonabend portrays the creation and perception of perfume through sound. Within this captivating space, spectators experience the perfumer’s organ, depicted by 200 optical prisms and their correlating 200 sounds representing a palette of raw ingredients, from bergamot oil to synthetic musk and violet leaf.
Understanding that every raw ingredient has its own character and texture, be it sharp, sweet, soft, hard, and may be used accordingly as a top, heart or base note, Sonabend created soundscapes from a library of sounds which he developed in response to the scent families, representing the volatility, stability and longevity of the raw materials. As the sounds are played, they continue for as long as the fragrance lasts - a top note that evaporates the quickest will play for the shortest, while the base note that comes to life after a few hours, will play for the longest.
The ingredient sounds have been then mixed together to create 5 different perfume music compositions: Eau de Cologne, Oriental, Fougère, Floral and Chypre. In the museum, these olfactory mini-symphonies are harmoniously played out with light as each ingredient from the fragrance formula is triggered by a laser beam hitting the prism, then bouncing into and illuminating a glass flacon centre piece, bottling the final creation. A poetic audio-visual metaphor for the process of imagining new perfumes.
If you follow this LINK to Vimeo you can experience ‘Fougère’ in a video of the installation
Also this LINK to Soundcloud has the music to all 5 fragrance creations
No. 1 Chypre
No.2 Eau De Cologne
No.3 Fougere
No. 4 Floral
No.5 Oriental
Credits Design and installation by Jason Bruges Studio Lead designer: Dagny Rewera A Permanent installation for Le Grand Musèe du Parfum Created in collaboration with IFF perfumers Anne Flipo and Jean-Chistophe Herault Visual artwork images by James Medcraft and Tilen Ti Music by Daniel Sonabend