A FEW WEEKS AGO, I mentioned I’d be attending the World Perfumery Congress WPC to a colleague.How very David Foster Wallace of you, he said, teasingly.It’s not a cruise! And I’m taking O Chem!I was WPC-bound to investigate an often-implicit presupposition in the history of aesthetics and reinforced nearly every day in the “fine” arts: that the authority of visual judgment ranks above all in a hierarchy of the senses, with sound as runner-up. I was there to explore how studying a nonvisual experience such as olfaction could help explain the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision
The Checkout catches up with trumpeter and composer Steph Richards, who unleashes our sense of sound and smell on her latest recordings Supersense and Zephyr.