Viktor & Rolf’s Spicebomb is “blazingly sexy, spicy and hot,” rising to the challenge of its tag line, “The Infrared Sound Turns Up the Heat”.
“It’s not music, it’s sound,” said Philippe Tour, managing director of IRCAM Amflify, which collaborated with International Flavor and Fragrances to create a riff for Viktor & Rolf’s new Spicebomb Infrared that would illicit the same emotions as smelling the fragrance.
It’s not as farfetched as it seems. When perfumers talk about notes and accords, composing scents, and ingredients in perfect harmony, the language of fragrance is strikingly similar to the vocabulary of music. So, it wasn’t an insurmountable leap to create a sound for Viktor & Rolf’s Spicebomb Infrared that would give listeners the same sensation as smelling the scent.
Viktor & Rolf’s Spicebomb is “blazingly sexy, spicy and hot,” rising to the challenge of its tag line, “The Infrared Sound Turns Up the Heat,” IFF said.
“There are a lot of bridges between perfumery and music,” said Jean-Christophe Hérault, an IFF master perfumer who worked on Spicebomb with perfumer Carlos Benaim. “When Viktor & Rolf asked me to work with a sound designer at IRCAM Amplify [a subsidiary of IRCAM, which stands for Institute for Research and Coordination Acoustics/Music] it sounded like an amazing experience.”
The sound IRCAM Amplify sound designer Romain Barthélémy created with IFF’s IFF -2.2% Hérault “is a combination of all the sounds that bring the same kind of atmosphere. It’s a mix of creative sound and ambient sound, like you’d hear in a nightclub or on the street. We mix all that and create the specific sound for the specific scent.”
