Demonstrating and guiding how to smell in tasting sessions: .nhHHHhh and the audible-visible production of sensorial intersubjectivity

Abstract

The paper describes the systematic use and sequential positioning of a specific nonlexical sound of the body, an audible sniff, indexing and making publicly audible that some smelling is being performed. It explores the methodic practice of audibly smelling in tasting sessions guided by an expert: it shows that the practice enables the smeller to secure and exhibit a primary access to a sensed object as well as to produce an epistemically and sensorially grounded descriptor of that object, presented as an authorized and normative description of the aroma. Several recurrent systematic sequential environments are described in which the practice of audibly smelling is observable, showing that it is used in a way that instructs the participants to engage themselves in smelling. The paper shows that the embodied sound of sniffing does not only manifest the individual sensorial engagement of its doer, but is also publicly orchestrated and recipient-designed in order to be heard as an instruction. In this way, the paper demonstrates how the production of a sound object such as an audible smelling sniff reveals the interactional order of sensorial practices; in turn, it also shows that sensoriality represents a perspicuous setting to better understand the articulation between sounds of the body and embodied actions.