You’re sitting in utter darkness, listening to the squeaks and shrieks of a difficult piece of contemporary music, when all of a sudden there’s a strong whiff of . . . lemons? It subsides, only to be replaced by a cool draught of something like air freshener, then, several ear-splitting minutes later, a waft of what smells suspiciously like sweaty feet.

This is one of the more bizarre experiences being offered by this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which opens today — an electronic chamber opera that breaks new ground in the field of concert-going by combining sounds and smells.

Lumen 3 is an Italian production by the composer Walter Prati and a team of technicians in Milan, and the three performances of it in Huddersfield on Sunday will be its premiere outside Italy. The work will also be heard and smelt by audiences of schoolchildren on Monday.

In a warehouse in the post-industrial outskirts of Milan, the creators of Lumen 3 are eager to demonstrate the technology that has made all this possible. Scent diffusers that look like spotlights are mounted on a heavy steel frame, controlled by a converted light mixer. There are 120 of these diffusers ranked above the audience’s heads, ready to produce bursts of specific aromas during the performance.

Yet the audience is unaware of them, as this is a performance that takes place in pitch darkness, listening to pre-recorded electronic music and a spoken text, here in translation, by the librettist Giuliano Corti. The text, mixed by Prati into the soundtrack, tells of a mental journey by a tourist returning home, with key words evoking memories of the house where he is headed.

Prati is a nattily dressed 50-year-old electronics wizard and cellist who has worked with many key figures in experimental jazz and contemporary music since being inspired early on by Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane. He’s also performing tonight at the London Jazz Festival with his long-standing collaborator, the saxophonist Evan Parker.

He was interested in a performance in the dark, he says, because he fears that we no longer know how to listen to music with our full attention. “I have three children, and they all listen to music while doing something else,” he says. “It’s a big social problem beyond music. Even within families there is this problem of not listening to each other. So here you go into the dark, where you can only listen. It’s a great stimulation of the imagination that visual aspects tend to cancel out.”

The idea of the smells, he says, came when he and some friends, including Corti, were sitting round a dinner table one night. How about introducing olfactory stimulation into a concert, he wondered. “We agreed on a marriage between the ear and the nose, but we wanted to put the eyes to rest,” Corti recalls. “There would no longer be a stage, so there’d be nothing to see.”

However, to allay any anxieties, a small amount of art- fully coloured light comes up in between each of the opera’s four “movements”, each of which last about ten minutes. In these short intermissions, Prati performs on acoustic instruments.

“Smell is used 300 times less than the other senses,” asserts the Mr Perfume of the team, Stefano Bader, head of a pioneering “ambient perfumes” company, Oikos Fragrances. “The perfumes were chosen to represent this journey, so where there’s grass or bread or cooking, we put those smells.”

Of course they are not derived from the real thing, he patiently explains, but are a chemical equivalent whose essence is stabilised in a small block like an eye shadow, which is then put into the diffusers. The scents stimulate our olfactory memory and produce a mental picture of what they represent.

The idea of complementing spectacle with smell was tried out in the 1960s with Odorama cinema, in which audiences were given cards to scratch and smell during a film. The technology has come a long way since then.

The commercial side of Bader’s business sells ambient scents for use in shops, hotel lobbies and fashion shows, or to induce a feeling of perfumed calm in dentists’ waiting rooms. A series of posters now advertising Miss Sixty at Milan tram stops use Oikos diffusers to release a burst of scent whenever a commuter draws near. The company has more than 500 smells in its catalogue, including abstract ones such as “courage” and “energy”.

What about bad smells? “We have made bad ones,” Bader says, citing a museum they perfumed, dealing with 19th-century Italian emigration. “We wanted to show what it was like at the end of a long voyage by ship, with sea-sickness and so on.” Another time they diffused a smell of chicken soup during a production of a Pinter play.

The director of the Huddersfield festival, Graham McKenzie, says Lumen 3 is an intriguing idea from an intriguing musician. “It’s also a good way of getting young people and schools to come along,” he said. “I think they’ll be interested in the smells — and maybe add a few of their own.”

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, (01484 430528) runs from today until Nov 26. www.hcmf.co.uk

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