Relaxing and stimulating ambient odors influence preferences for musical tempo

It has recently been shown that relaxing and stimulating odors distort time perception by slowing down or speeding up the pacemaker of the internal clock. Since individuals tend to prefer musical tempo at the rate of the pacemaker, we examined whether relaxing and stimulating ambient odors could bias tempo preference in a study in which the musical stimuli were unfamiliar pleasant musical excerpts. Participants listened to pairs of excerpts played at slightly different tempi and had to indicate which one they preferred. We hypothesized that participants exposed to a relaxing odor (strawberry) would prefer the slower excerpts while participants exposed to a stimulating odor (lemon) would prefer the faster excerpts. As expected, the findings showed that participants in the control (no odor) condition preferred the slower of the fast-tempo pairs of excerpts and the faster of the slow-tempo pairs, indicating a preference bias for moderate tempo. Preferences in both odor conditions differed significantly from those in the control condition such that no such preference bias was observed. There was an interaction between tempo and odor such that participants showed no preference for the slower of the fast-tempo pairs of excerpts in the presence of a lemon odor, and no preference for the faster of the slow-tempo pairs in the presence of a strawberry odor. To our knowledge, this is the first time it has been shown that odors can alter the rate of the pacemaker without participants being conscious of the presence of an olfactory stimulus in the environment.