Olfacoustics is an 18-month post-doctoral project funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) that aims to empirically investigate the semantic mediation hypothesis in auditory-olfactory correspondences.

This hypothesis proposes that associations between different sensory domains may be partly attributed to shared semantic properties. Auditory-olfactory correspondences constitute an intriguing ground for studying possible semantic mediation effects as their relationship is among the less explored in cross-modal research besides being considered as two of the most ineffable senses.

While olfactory and auditory semantics are often based on source-cause categories (‘sounds like a piano’, ‘smells like citrus’, etc.) there is evidence that they may also share some more abstract semantic dimensions such as ‘brightness’, ‘warmth’, ‘clarity’, or ‘richness’.

PI: Asteris Zacharakis