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Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

Article in Review of Philosophy and Psychology · March 2009

DOI: 10.1007/s13164-009-0002-7

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Rev.Phil.Psych.
DOI 10.1007/s13164-009-0002-7

Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

David Roden

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Musicians and theorists such as the radiophonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer,
view the products of new audio technologies as devices whereby the experience of
sound can be displaced from its causal origins and achieve new musical or poetic
resonances. Accordingly, the listening experience associated with sonic art within
this perspective is ‘acousmatic’; the process of sound generation playing no role in
the description or understanding of the experience as such. In this paper I shall
articulate and defend a position according to which an adequate phenomenology of
auditory experience must refer to mechanisms of sound generation. This position is
shown to follow from a phenomenology of sounds as located events and a
physicalist account of auditory properties as features of the temporal development of
such events.

1 Introduction

Over the last century, music practice has been transformed by technologies which
allow the manipulation of sound material or musical events to be undertaken
with greater speed and at ever greater levels of abstraction from acoustic reality.
These tools have stimulated a theoretical and compositional emphasis on
‘timbral’ aspects of sound which resist regimentation within the traditional
‘lattice’ of pitch relations, harmonic structures or relative time values.1 For
example, whereas traditional composition employs permutations of discrete pitch
or time values, digital synthesisers allow us to make a piece which consists of
spectral transformations of a single developing sound (Wishart 1966). Tape

1
Timbre is what differentiates—say—a concert A played for a certain time interval on a piano and the
same note played on a clarinet or oboe. Similarly, much inharmonic or untuned sound—noise—is
timbrally differentiated in spite of lacking definable pitch or rhythmic characteristics.
D. Roden (*)
Bristol, UK
e-mail: davidroden7@googlemail.com
 D. Roden

recording and, latterly, digital sampling have meanwhile allowed the use of pre-
existent sonic material in ways that challenge both the formalism of traditional
Western musical practice and the boundaries between artistic genres such as music,
plastic art or film.
There have been numerous critical and philosophical responses to this new ‘sonic
art’. Arguably, the most influential approach in the current literature on electro-
acoustic music is the phenomenological account of the sound-object provided in the
work of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer views the products of new audio technologies as
‘machines for feeling’ which displace sounds from their causal origins and achieve
new musical or poetic resonances (Dack 1994). Accordingly, the mode of listening
proper to sonic art within this perspective is an ‘acousmatic’ or ‘reduced’ listening.
The term ‘acousmatic’ alludes to Pythagoras’ reputed practice of lecturing from
behind a screen so that his disciples would attend to the content of his words rather
than the personality behind them (Scruton 1997). For Schaeffer, technologies like
radio and analogue recording cut the intentional bond between the hearing of sounds
and their physical or environmental causes: the latter being immaterial to their
aesthetic impact. Thus Schaeffer relates how he recorded the sound of a bell without
its attack or onset. He writes ‘deprived of its percussion the bell becomes an oboe’.2
The alteration of the temporal envelope of the sound obscures its causal origins and
thus reveals hitherto concealed analogies between causally distinct kinds of sonic
event (See Section 3 below).
For Schaeffer, the sound object is the sound as heard, as opposed to the
presumptive cause of the auditory experience. Schaefferian sounds objects are
constituted by an auditory mode of presentation purified of intentional references to
physical sound events, physical properties or mechanical processes of sound
generation. This implies that the aesthetic contemplation of l’objet sonore is
likewise closed within this putative realm of subjective givenness and may neither
draw on information about the physical or technological aspects of sound generation
nor contribute to it (Schaeffer 1966).
It would be precipitate to deny the critical and practical value of Schaeffer’s
account. However, in what follows I suggest an alternative ontological
framework which develops some recent ideas in the analytic metaphysics of
sound. My argument rests on the assumption that the phenomenology and
epistemology of hearing favour an ontology of sounds as located physical events.
The version of the located events theory (henceforth LET) proposed by Roberto
Casati and Jerome Dokic in their book La philosophie du son is briefly outlined in
Section 2. In Section 3 I discuss the status of phenomenal properties of sound in
the LET and argue for its amendment to allow for a physicalist conception of such
properties. In Section 4 I consider some difficulties for the LET presented by our
experience of sonic art and attempt to reconcile it with these phenomenological
facts. Finally, in Section 5 I consider whether the phenomenology of algorithmic
music and the existence of competing but empirically equivalent metaphysical

2
‘Pierre Schaeffer and the Significance of Radiophonic Art’.
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

views of sound reveal ineliminable indeterminacies in the location and character of

sonic events.

2 Located Events

When I hear a footfall in a street outside my window, a distant ambulance siren, a

dog barking at night it seems incontestable that what I hear lies in the space beyond
my ears. Some philosophers have cited this everyday phenomenology of auditory
location as reason for rejecting the metaphysics of sound that is often implicit in
textbooks of acoustics and psychoacoustics. According to Nicolas Bullot, Roberto
Casati, Jérôme Dokic and Maurizio Giri this crops up in two main forms: ‘proximal
theories’ according to which sounds are non-representational sensations or qualia
produced by the auditory system and ‘medial theories’ which identify sounds with
the transmission of acoustic energy.3
In contrast, Bullot et al. claim that sounds are generally found where they are
heard. We hear sounds located in space. We hear moving sounds.4 Sometimes we
hear sounds badly or indistinctly—as when they are masked by other sounds.5 We
experience sounds as in the world through which we move. Since auditory objects
are experienced as being in space, only a theory which locates them there can be true
to the phenomenology.
They claim that this view comports with viewing sounds as vibrations in
resonating objects.6 As Casati and Dokic point out in La philosophie du son, this
allows us to reconcile a theory of indirect perception with the rejection of mental
intermediaries such as sense data. We get information about properties of objects via
their sounds. Sounds are perceptual intermediaries which convey information about
the physical dispositions of things in which the sounds occur and upon which their
characteristics depend.7

3 Auditory Properties

The located event theory (LET) is not without problems, however, since its
proponents must reckon with classical epistemological issues regarding the mode of
existence of our sensory ‘ideas’. If sounds are events in resonating objects, does it
follow that psychoacoustic properties such as experienced pitch or timbre are
predicated of those same events or resonators?

3
Bullot et al. (2004).
4
In fact Casati and Dokic argue that since events and processes are temporally extended we cannot
localize an event at a point where only one of its phases had occurred. However different temporal phases
of a vibratory event occur at distinct locations, which is what reports regarding the ‘movement’ of sounds
advert to. Here they follow Fred Dretske’s argument against the claim that events can move (Casati and
Dokic 2005a; Dretske 1967).
5
la philosophie du son, Chapter 3.
6
Casati and Dokic (2005a). See O’Callaghan(2004). See also Casati and Dokic (2005b).
7
La philosophie du son, p. 46. See Sections 3 and 5 below.
 D. Roden

Take the example of pitch. Psychometric assessments of subjective pitch

differences are consistent between listeners but are not related in a consistent
numerical way to differences in frequencies.8 Thus pitch is not identical with
frequency. This is generally assumed to support the view that pitch is a ‘subjective
psychological quality merely correlated with the frequency of a sound’.9
Psychoacoustic data can, then, be cited in support of a projectivist position
according to which there are no physical entities with phenomenal properties like
pitch or timbre—and that, insofar as these are properties of anything, they are mental
properties (erroneously) projected upon the real world. Conceivably, it could also
motivate Lockean-style accounts according to which pitch is treated as a secondary
quality identified with the disposition to produce mental states characterised by the
aforementioned subjective property.10
Both accounts, however, appear incompatible with the phenomenology motivat-
ing the LET. If auditory properties are mental or subjective they cannot be properties
of resonance events or resonating objects.11 This suggests that auditory experience is
systematically misleading insofar as pitch and timbre appear to be properties of such
events or objects. The claim that auditory properties are subjectively-typed
dispositions, on the other hand, seems hard to square with the intuition that what
we hear are the actualisations of various kinds of dispositions not dispositions as
such.12
One way in which a proponent of a physicalist event theory can respond to this
predicament is to look for a relationship between an auditory property, pitch, and a
physical quantity like frequency which allows the former to be treated as property of
the sound which varies as a function of the latter. O’Callaghan has employed
psychometric data to argue that that there is such a function and that it has a
physiological basis in the critical frequency bands within which the inner ear (or
cochlea) analyses complex sounds into component sinusoids.13 O’Callaghan’s
solution coheres with a representationalist (or wide intentionalist) view according
to which phenomenal characteristics of sound such as pitch are objective properties
represented or ‘tracked’ by those experiences. Accordingly pitch difference would be
an objective property of sounds mathematically related to frequency difference but
not identical to it.
It is not within the scope of this paper to assess O’Callaghan’s account of pitch.14
However, his position can be juxtaposed with a more modest physicalism which
does not presuppose a consistent relationship between auditory discrimination and a
restricted set of physical quantities. This view, I think, is more prima facie plausible
in the case of the audible property that is the chief concern of computer musicians:
timbre. In traditional musical contexts we distinguish timbres in terms of typical

8
Casey O’Callaghan, ‘Pitch’, pp. 6–7; Shepard (2001).
9
‘Pitch’, p. 7.
10
‘Pitch’, pp. 9–10; La philosophie du son, chapter 11.
11
This problem applies to phenomenal properties in other sense modalities of course. See Shoemaker
(1994).
12
McGinn (1996). See below.
13
See ‘Pitch’, pp. 14–21.
14
It is not clear that it can also accommodate musical pitch relations as opposed to the psychometric pitch
relations employed in his statement of the pitch/frequency relation.
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

mechanisms of sound generation: we distinguish the timbre of a piano playing a

concert ‘A’ from that of a clarinet or violin playing the same note. We differentiate
timbres in terms of morphology: for example, by contrasting sounds with a sharp
onset or attack and exponential decay with continuant sounds such as drones or
sustained strings.
However, these discriminations utilize many different kinds of physical variation
or pattern. For example, Jean-Claude Risset found that the characteristic sound of the
trumpet depends on differences between the envelopes of partials in its onset or
attack phase. The differences themselves are indiscernible for listeners yet provide a
‘signature’ distinguishing the trumpet from the oboe, say.15 Other instrumental
signatures are more dependent upon the spectral content of their ‘sustain’ phase.
Whether a sound event is ‘fused’ into a single percept or is perceived as
simultaneous sound events can also depend on whether each these frequency
components exhibit random variations in frequency. John Chowning relates some
experiments in the synthesis of a female voice which show that only when a
common pitch variation was added to the individual harmonics of a synthesised
voice did these manifest as a single sonic entity recognizable as a human voice.16
Timbral discrimination, then, does not plausibly ‘track’ a single type of physical
feature, as O’Callaghan claims of pitch discrimination, but relatively idiomatic patterns
of relations between such features. This is consistent with a qualified interpretation of
timbral kinds as consisting of recurrent constellations of features of sound generation
processes, but it need not entail an essential limit on what kinds of relationships
between more basic physical features can be picked out through identification of
timbres. This seems plausible given that we normally use timbre to track complex
processes such as the crying of babies (or cats), the percussion of hail on corrugated
iron, or the motion of a fan blade in an extractor—not basic physical properties.
When we perceive timbral properties, I propose, we perceive relationships
between variable sets of physical features which, in turn, contain information about
idiomatic features of the sound generation mechanisms and thus about the
environmental objects in which the sounds occur. This is consistent with the
phenomenal richness of timbre and its resistance to the kind of hierarchical
organisation that pitch relations are susceptible to.
This position can be contrasted with that developed by Casati and Dokic in La
philosophie du son. They reject the subjectivist theory according to which audible
properties such as timbre or visual properties such as colour are non-intentional
properties of perceptual states on the familiar grounds that we perceive these
properties as inhering in the things perceived (see above). They likewise reject
accounts of secondary qualities which identify them with dispositions to cause a
given sensory response, whether this response is defined in relation to an
independently characterised property of the sensation or as a disposition of the
object to appear to have the dispositional quality in question. Dispositional theories,
they claim, are also incompatible with the phenomenology since we do not see or

15
Risset (1966), cited in Dodge and Jerse (1997).
16
John Chowning, ‘Perceptual Fusion and Auditory Perspective’, cited in Music, Cognition and
Computerised Sound, pp. 264–267.
 D. Roden

hear objects as possessing a disposition to cause a given sensory response: ‘From the
phenomenological point of view, ordinary vision is non-reflexive’.17
They nonetheless concur with the dispositionalists in distinguishing between
primary qualities like shape which can be defined without reference to a sensory point
of view and secondary qualities which are real properties of sensed objects but whose
conditions of existence (or exemplification) are tied to human sensory responses.18
Thus while holding that sounds are physical events and thus ‘essentially non-
phenomenal’, phenomenal properties of sound such as pitch and timbre are said to
be non-relational but contingent properties of sound (propriétés accidentelles du son)
which only inhere in sonic events given a ‘human’ auditory perspective on the world
(Casati and Dokic 2005a, p. 179). While sounds essentially possess physical
properties, then, they contingently possess phenomenal properties (audibilia) that are
only accessible from a human auditory point of view and (by analogy with a related
theory of visibilia) are existentially dependent upon an auditory sense modality.19
Meanwhile, sounds themselves—being existentially independent of perceiving
subjects—are non-phenomenal. That is to say, they necessarily bear physical
properties while they contingently bear phenomenal properties (Casati and Dokic
2005a, pp. 179–80). The phenomenal properties instantiated by a particular sound
are accidental properties of that event but, as with visual phenomenal properties,
supervene20 on the dispositions of the sounding object to affect subjects in particular
ways without being identified with them:
It is possible to affirm that the attribution of a secondary quality to an object...
is only conceived adequately if it is conceived as being true in virtue of a
disposition of the object to present a determinate phenomenal appearance.21

17
La philosophie du son, pp. 173–4, [my trans.]. One could object, with Sidney Shoemaker, that a
complex relation such as a disposition could still be represented perceptually as monadic. So the fact, if it
is one, that vision is non-reflexive is hardly decisive here (Shoemaker 1994). Shoemaker’s objection is
persuasive. Nonetheless, treating phenomenal character as relational in this way presents other difficulties.
For example, what kind of relations fit the bill? Dispositions do not seem to, for reasons already
mentioned above. It is difficult to reconcile the claim that phenomenal properties are causal relations with
the assumption that the properties objects are represented as possessing in audition and vision appear to be
there when nobody is around to have experiences with those contents produced in them. If phenomenal
properties are indeed will o’ the wisps then it is unclear how they represent persistent and observer-
independent properties in an organism’s environment. See Tye (2000).
18
La philosophie du son, p.175.
19
Casati and Dokic (2005a), pp. 175–176. The idea of existential dependence in supervenience theories is
explicated towards the end of this section.
20
The notion of supervenience is frequently used by non-reductive materialists to express the dependence
of mental properties on physical properties without entailing their reducibility to the latter. Informally: M
properties supervene on P properties if a thing’s P properties determine its M properties. If aesthetic
properties supervene on physical properties, if x is physically identical to y and x is beautiful, y must be
beautiful. Supervenience accounts vary with the modal force of the entailments involved. ‘Natural’ or
‘nomological’ supervenience holds in worlds whose physical laws are like our own. ‘Metaphysical
supervenience’, on the other hand, is often claimed to hold with logical or conceptual necessity
(Section 5). See Kim (1984).
21
Kim (1984), p. 177 [my trans.]. The theory is, in this respect, similar in its metaphysical underpinnings
to the supervenience dispositional account of phenomenal qualities advanced by Colin McGinn. See
‘Another Look at Color’.
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

Contrary, however, to a traditional dispositional account of secondary qualities

‘Colour [or timbre, etc.] is not identified with this disposition; it belongs to an
ontological category that is sui generis, that of phenomenal appearances.’22
How does this theory compare with the physicalist alternative expounded above?
Well, if we assume the LET and we are to attach any content to the claims that sounds
are ‘essentially non-phenomenal’ we are committed to one of two paths: we must aver
1) that we do not hear sounds, but only their phenomenal deputies (pitch, duration,
timbre, etc.), or 2) import subscripts into the verb ‘to hear’ such that it has a different
sense applied to sonic events from when it is applied to the phenomenal properties of
sound (i.e. ‘hearE’ [event-hearing] versus ‘hearP’ [property-hearing]). Thesis 1)
undermines the phenomenological premises of the LET and can thus be discounted.
Thesis 2), then, seems inescapable: implying that the perception of a sound is distinct
in some way from the perception of its pitch, timbre, loudness, etc. We must
henceforth say that we hearE the ringing of a bell, but hearP its pitch or timbre.
This proposed ambiguity is not semantically objectionable.23 However, a
distinction between the perceiving of events and the perceiving of their auditory
properties is particularly unfortunate in the case of audition since auditory properties
are related to the temporal development of sonic events themselves.24
This relation varies according to the different components of timbre. The
brightness or harshness of sounds is related to the spread of energy across its
harmonic spectrum. As an illustration of this, let’s consider a process of sound
generation widely used by computer musicians over the last fifty years: the
frequency modulation (FM) of a sine way by another sine wave. The first is referred
to as the ‘carrier’, while the second is called the ‘modulator’. In FM synthesis the
modulating wave displaces the frequency of the carrier by a value proportional to its
amplitude over a period determined by the frequency of the modulator.25
FM provides a computationally efficient way of generating sounds with complex
spectra from simple modulator/carrier sign wave pairs. This process is represented below
in the time domain (amplitude on the y-axis against time on the x-axis). Figure 1 shows a
virtual oscilloscope graph of a modulating sine wave at 16 Hz, Fig. 2 a carrier at 8 Hz.
Figures 3, 4 and 5 show the effect on the carrier as the amplitude of the modulator
source is ramped from 0.1, to 0.14, and to 0.28 (relative to a maximum amplitude of 1).
In the frequency domain this produces a sound with a complex spectrum
containing the carrier frequency (8 Hz) but also with spectral components on ‘either
side’ of the original frequency. Thus we have the original frequency and values
above it determined by integer multiples of M = 16 Hz: C = 8 Hz, C + 1*16 Hz,
C+ 2*16 Hz, C+ 3*16 Hz... etc. ‘Below’ C we have: C − 1*16 Hz, C − 2*16 Hz,
C − 3*16 Hz, etc. In the case of audible carrier frequencies (8 Hz is, of course,
22
La philosophie du son, p. 177 [my trans.].
23
The suggestion that there are discrete ‘perceptual acts’ for events, objects, properties and other
ontological categories is not self-contradictory or absurd.
24
This should not be confused with the distinction between hearing a sound with a given auditory
property (say, fast attack) and hearing that the sound has a fast attack (where the presence of a ‘that’
clause implies a perceptual judgment or the capacity to employ morphological concepts such as attack and
decay). To perceive an event one must be able to perceive some features of its temporal development (if
only that it begins or ceases). It does not follow that one will be able to form the correlative beliefs or
wield the correlative concepts.
25
Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition and Performance, pp. 115–135.
 D. Roden

Fig. 1 Virtual oscilloscope graph of a modulating sine wave at 16 Hz

below the normal threshold of audition) as the modulation ramps up, we hear these
emerging sidebands as a steadily increasing ‘harshness’ or ‘brightness’ in the sound.
Here, the timbral alteration of the sonic event consists in increasing spectral richness,
itself an expression of the increased complexity of the periodic behaviour in the time
domain displayed on the successive oscilloscope graphs.
The envelope or change in loudness over time is—as noted above—an equally
significant constituent of a sound’s timbre. A sound’s temporal envelope is
analogous to an object’s spatial shape in that it seems like just as good a candidate
for primary quality status. That is, even if we accept Casati and Dokic’s claim that
some sensory qualities are dependent upon an observer’s sensory response most
would agree that the concept of shape is ‘conceptually independent’ of observer
response.26 The only difference between spatial shape and the amplitude envelope of
a sound is that the former is describable in terms of sets of points representing spatial
boundaries while the latter is a boundary describable in terms of sets of points
representing pressure over time. According to the LET a sound event is a disturbance
within a resonating material which can be fully described (in the time domain) in
terms of its envelope. The event consists in a particular pattern of change in these
displacements which, in harmonic sounds, has a periodic form. Given that the
envelope is no more observer-dependent than shape, it follows that an important
dimension of timbre (the feature of sound most obviously analogous to colour) is not
linked conceptually to observer response (whether this is cashed out in terms of
dispositions, supervenience upon dispositions or qualia, etc.).
The only solution for those who would retain secondary status for some component
of timbre—such as spectral richness—is to treat it as construction from putatively
simple primary and secondary phenomenal properties. Whatever the logical merits of
this view, though, it does not seem phenomenologically warranted. The spectrum of a
periodic sound has an admittedly abstract relationship to the sonic event considered as
a time series since it must be extracted from successive intensities or amplitudes via a
Fourier transform or some other method of extracting harmonic constituents (such as
is exploited by the cochlea). However, it is difficult to see why this suffices to accord
this timbral dimension a categorically distinct status, since there is no reason to think
that our perception of more familiar features of temporal sequences depends on
processes that are in any way simple computationally speaking.27 Certainly, a sound’s
temporal shape seems no less ‘phenomenal’ than its harmonic structure. We can learn
to analytically dissociate the spectral properties of sounds from their envelopes, but we
26
‘Another Look at Colour’, p. 545.
27
For connectionist treatments of this topic see Timothy Van Gelder, ‘Wooden Iron, Husserlian
Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science,’ in Naturalising Phenomenology, p. 260; Port et al. (1994).
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

Fig. 2 A carrier at 8 Hz

nonetheless hear sounds with distinct timbres. If there are no phenomenological

grounds motivating a ‘constructionist’ view here it is difficult to see why
considerations of any other kind should be persuasive.
Thus there is no categorical distinction to be made between our perception of a
sonic event and our perceiving aspects of its temporal shape and thus of its timbre.
Of course, we may hear qualitatively distinct aspects of that shape. The amplitude
envelope is one such feature while the spectral properties we capture with terms like
‘brightness’, ‘harshness’, ‘dullness’ is another. Since both aspects are recognised as
among the important components of timbre and since both qualify as primary
qualities there is no obvious barrier to regarding sounds as 1) particulars existing
independently of subjects and 2) as phenomenal.28
It is possible to argue that Casati and Dokic’s supervenience view of phenomenal
properties as intrinsic but non-physical properties of objects is indirectly supported
by appeal to thought experiments involving contrary perceptual responses to the
same object or to physically identical objects under identical conditions. Suppose
(using an example with which Colin McGinn illustrates his supervenience account of
colour) we see ripe strawberries as red while Martians see them as green. According
to the supervenience account the fact that they are red is entailed by the fact that they
are disposed to look red to us while the fact that they are green is entailed by their
disposition to produce an experience of green strawberries for Martians. As McGinn
puts it ‘Colour terms are not logically relational in themselves; rather their
application is merely controlled by inherently relational dispositions’.29
Thus ripe strawberries are ‘green’, but only relative to a Martian standpoint
warranting the ascription of ‘green’ to them. Likewise they are ‘red’ relative to a
human standpoint which warrants the use of a contrary predicate. This neatly
explains how Casati and Dokic’s supervenience theory entails the existential
dependence of secondary qualities upon perceptual standpoints. For any semantic
account of the truth conditions of colour ascriptions would have to be relativised to
the perceptual standpoints of relevant groups of perceivers.
Now, we can accept that observers with different sensory systems might
experience different things when viewing the same object because they are sensitive
to different properties of those objects. No implications flow for the sensory
response-dependence of phenomenal properties. Likewise, perceivers with similar,
but differently attuned perceptual systems may have veridical but phenomenally
distinct perceptions of the same event or object. For example, a trained musician can

28
La philosophie du son, p. 179.
29
‘Another Look at Colour’, pp. 545–46.
 D. Roden

Fig. 3 The effect on the carrier as the amplitude of the modulator source is ramped from 0.1, to 0.14, and
to 0.28 (relative to a maximum amplitude of 1)

hear the inner voices in a four part chorale, while beginners may only hear the upper
melody and bass. Again, no implications follow regarding the dependence of
ontology on access conditions.30
The only situation precluded by physicalism is one where different subjects have
veridical perceptions of contrary phenomenal properties inhering in the same object
(as in the blue–red case). Here the physicalist only has to insist that no such special
cases ever occur. Where they seem to occur, either the phenomenal properties are not
contraries after all or one of the experiences is not veridical. Now, assuming that
phenomenal experiences convey information about physical features of perceived
entities there cannot be contrary veridical perceptions (hence no relativity of
phenomenal properties to sensory viewpoint). Where I hear the sound of a tuning
fork as a characteristic pure tone (sine wave) and another hears it as a rasping square
wave, the latter is in error. His experience imputes a spectral complexity to the
sound’s periodic behaviour which it does not possess.
These arguments suggest that an amended, physicalist form of the LET
(henceforth LETA) coheres better with the event character of sounds than its anti-
physicalist competitors. LETA maintains the earlier versions claim that sounds are
located and event-like but integrates audibilia more seamlessly within this ontology.
Thus it is consonant with LETA to suppose that timbre is a cluster phenomenon
analyzable along a number of physically specifiable dimensions (such as envelope
and spectral spread). But it is phenomenal only to the degree that the physical event
which exhibits it is phenomenal.
With LETA there is no difference in kind between our perceptual access to the
physical sound event and our access to its phenomenal properties. A sound event
consists of changes or differences in the state of a sounding object. To perceive a
sound just is to perceive these changes or differences.31

4 Decontextualized Sound

It can be objected, at this point, that the phenomenological underpinning of the LET
(and thereby LETA) is challenged by the exigencies of sonic art. While in our

30
For a parallel discussion of cases of different colour acuity see Tye (2002).
31
It might be objected that we can imagine a subject hearing a constant sound—a pure tone, say—without
altering in pitch or timbre. However, this sound would have a characteristic timbre. In this case LETA
entails that the subject would perceive the periodic behaviour constitutive of the sound even where the
global character of these changes—their sinusoidal character—might never alter. The same point naturally
applies to inharmonic, aperiodic sounds.
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

Fig. 4 The effect on the carrier as the amplitude of the modulator source is ramped from 0.1, to 0.14, and
to 0.28 (relative to a maximum amplitude of 1)

ordinary lives we are concerned with sound events in medias res, the phenomenol-
ogy of much sonic art is, for want of a better term, ‘slack’. This is because its
material is often dynamically ‘other’ with respect to familiar natural or musical
sounds. Indeed, one reason why its sound events can be conceived (if not heard) as
‘other’ is that we are unable to hear them as occurring in objects.32
This is true, for example, of synthesised sounds whose spectral profiles bear no
resemblance to those of familiar musical resonators like vibrating strings, struck metal,
etc. These sounds create an experience of aesthetic estrangement by forestalling
identification of the types of events to which they belong. An experience of auditory
dislocation can also be created through the spatial arrangement of directional speakers in
a large chamber, as in Bruce Nauman’s sound installation Raw Materials (Nauman
2004; Storr 2004). If we stand near one of the speakers we hear only one of the twenty
texts Nauman loops through each one. However, outside the focus of the speaker, the
texts leak into one another and seem to ‘fill’ the space around us rather than being in a
well-defined place - though both versions of the LET would locate the sounds in the
space in which they are generated (roughly, the diaphragm of the speaker).33
How, then, can this phenomenology be reconciled with any version of the LET?
The obvious response, perhaps, is to suggest that the experience of a sound as
devoid of the auditory cues that would ordinarily relate it to a world of resonating
objects is a kind of perceptual illusion. The ‘distribution of sound waves in the
environment’ obscures the location of the sound, just as a mirror causes us to have
an experience in which an object is misperceived as lying beyond the mirror plane.34
But it is not clear that we should assimilate cases where an object is presented in a
location which it does not occupy to cases where a sonic event is not perceptually
represented as possessing location at all (or as having an indeterminate location).
Thus it can be objected that the event theory is not supported by the slack
phenomenology of decontextualised sound and is disconfirmed by it insofar as it
demonstrates that sounds are not necessarily located at all.35
The short answer to this is that where a sound is heard as lacking determinate
location or clear causal origin, it does not follow that it cannot be subsequently
located—either via cross-modal experience or by using empirical knowledge of the
causal origins of different types of sound. The locatedness of sound events does not

32
And (as Casati and Dokic argue) it is only by being heard in objects that we can locate events in space.
33
Though see Section 5 below.
34
la philosophie du son, Chapter 4, pp. 49–50; ‘Sounding Objects’ p. 4.
35
Matthew Nudds, ‘Experiencing the Production of Sounds’, European Journal of Philosophy 9:2, pp.
210–229.
 D. Roden

Fig. 5 The effect on the carrier as the amplitude of the modulator source is ramped from 0.1, to 0.14, and
to 0.28 (relative to a maximum amplitude of 1)

entail that sounds are experienced as having determinate location at any particular
phase of an experience.
The denial of an entailment from the experience of locational indeterminacy to
non-locatedness per se is metaphysically correct, but it is not sufficient to shore up
the LET. The main justification cited for the LET, after all, is the phenomenology of
those experiences in which we hear sounds as located. Thus the LET theorist is
being inconsistent if she draws on the phenomenology of sound where it lends prima
facie support to her ontology, while denying that the phenomenology of dislocated
sound has any ontological (as opposed to epistemological) implications: both
phenomenologies surely need to be taken into account. Moreover, the decontextual-
ised experience of sound arguably has more metaphysical force when we come to
reflect on the necessary attributes of sound; for the fact that some sounds are
perceived without determinate location means that our auditory sense is not (unlike
our visual or tactile sense modalities) intrinsically spatial. Sounds can be perceived
as located, but they need not be.
However, as Matthew Nudds points out, senses are not simply discrete windows
on the world. They jointly contribute to a developing epistemic and cognitive
relationship with entities in a common world. When we hear a sound in the mouth of
a ventriloquist’s dummy we mis-locate an event occurring in the throat of the
ventriloquist through visual misdirection (the ventriloquist is not seen as speaking,
the dummy is).36
But this only goes to show that spatial indeterminacy in audition is not a
property of sound but a phase in a developing cognitive relationship to it. A
continuous electronic whining may be initially mysterious, and then mistakenly
attributed to a faulty a smoke alarm. Finally—after its loudness is shown not to
vary with one’s distance from the alarm—it may be correctly identified as the
malfunctioning cell phone in one’s pocket. We distinguish between Φ being
indeterminately represented and being indeterminately Φ in situations where it is
possible to progressively reduce that indeterminacy. The location of sounds in
vibrating materials is one of the Φ’s to which this distinction applies for the most
part. Failing that it would be impossible to recontextualise sounds that are initially
heard in a decontextualised manner.
It might be objected that the possibility of a purely aesthetic interest in sound
presupposes the phenomenology of pure aesthetic or ‘narrow’ sound objects distinct
from the physical or technical processes which bring about our experiences of them.
36
‘Experiencing the Production of Sounds’, p, 217.
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

In response, we can deny that an aesthetic interest necessitates a special category

of object apt for that interest. Upon hearing the malfunctioning phone we were
concerned with the nature and location of an irritating electronic sound (with a view
to stopping it!) while this interest may be lacking in aesthetic situations.
Electronically generated musical sounds may be dynamically and spectrally
anomalous but listeners may be largely concerned with their morphological
relationships with each other or with their mimetic features. The difference is not
between the kind of object experienced but in our attitude to subsequent cognitive
relationships with it. Given the identification of sounds with located events (LET)
and their phenomenal properties with their physical features (LETA) it is impossible
to ‘bracket’ the generative mechanisms which cause our auditory experiences and
attend to an object whose description entails no commitment to physical mechanisms
(though, as I argue in the next section, those generative mechanisms may be
delimited in different ways). However, if we distinguish ordinary and ‘acousmatic’
listening attitudinally, the ontological distinction between ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’
intentional objects becomes superfluous.

5 Algorithmic Audibilia and Sources of Indeterminacy

LETA need not entail that relations between physical states are the only audibilia.
There are discriminable features realised by sounds with disparate phenomenal
properties (such as tokening the English word ‘cat’) or that of being a variation upon
a particular musical theme (which need not imply formal identity with the theme).
Sounds can bear abstract properties. The serialist procedure of inversion creates a
second phrase intervallically symmetrical with the original ‘seed’ phrase around its
starting pitch and can be employed to create an audible ‘mirror texture’, with phrases
simultaneously rising and falling.
Sounds can thus implement algorithms (and do so audibly!) and token semantic
or syntactic types. They can act as non-mental perceptual intermediaries regarding
the physical states of sounding objects,37 but also inform us about other states or
processes. For example, I have produced a simple drum machine in the software
environment MAX MSP in which each rhythm is represented as a grid of velocity
values at particular subdivisions of time. A zero value represents no ‘hit’ while a
value of 127 represents the loudest hit. Once we represent this grid on a fixed length
array we can manipulate it with a computer program that periodically rearranges
these values. We can ‘shuffle’ them by cycling around the grid by a fixed value.
Thus if the grid is 16 time units and the displacement is nine units, a hit at 1 is
moved to 10 while a hit at 9 is moved to 2. This is a simple algorithm for generating
new rhythms from rhythmic seed.
When we hear the rhythmic line being displaced by the computational process we
hear alterations in the relationships between sound intensities which constitute the

37
La philosophie du son, Chapter 3.
 D. Roden

rhythm. However, we also obtain information—however partial—about computa-

tional processes within the mechanism generating the sounds.38
Allowing algorithmic properties within the charmed circle of audibilia presents no
problems for LETA’s physicalism because the algorithmic properties of sound
supervene on their physical properties in non-mysterious ways.39 However, this
formulation is somewhat open-ended as things stand because there are multiple
candidates for the supervenience bases of the algorithmic properties. The recipe for
beat manipulation described above depends on the vibratory properties (timbre,
loudness) of the relevant sounds lining up in the right way at the right time. This
would hold true even in a ‘metaphysically possible’ world in which speakers had
two modes of operation. In ‘natural mode’ we apply an alternating voltage to the
speaker’s electromagnet and create the sound in the usual way. In ‘magic mode’
spirits inhabit the diaphragm and make it oscillate in precisely the same way
(implementing the algorithm as per ritual specifications).
Clearly, this world does not operate according to our laws. So it is arguable that
the algorithmic properties of electronically generated sound metaphysically
supervene on the behaviour of a vibrating diaphragm in a speaker. They also
naturally supervene on the same behaviour insofar as all naturally possible worlds
must be metaphysically possible. However, one of the ways in which the oscillatory
behaviour of speaker diaphragms is caused is through being stimulated by voltage
changes caused by the alternating output from a digital-analogue converter (DAC),
these being triggered by a succession of digital samples represented in file locations
in a computer’s working memory. So if algorithmic facts naturally supervene on
facts about the state of the speaker diaphragm over time, they naturally supervene on
facts about local systems in which the speaker is contained which are causally
sufficient for that behaviour.
Similar considerations apply to the timbral properties of the drum sounds
themselves since—in the case envisaged—these will naturally supervene on the
behaviour of a containing system which includes a computer, a DAC and a speaker
(they could be also be produced by a spiritually inspired speaker in a world utterly
unlike ours).
Casati and Dokic’s event theory identifies sound with a ‘vibratory event/process
occurring in the stuff of a resonating material/physical object’.40 If we single out this
generative process or event as the one on which a particular auditory experience
depends then these event/processes could involve not only vibrations but other
distally accessible causal processes. With computer generated sound in particular, it
is possible to locate the sound in a wider containing system rather than in the speaker
diaphragm alone. From the purview of a computer musician or critic, locating the
sound in a vibrating object alone may constitute an arbitrary and incomprehensible
excision: for the succession of vibratory events may manifest an organizing process
whose generative mechanism includes (say) a computer-audio system and gestural

38
An equivalent point can, of course, be made about algorithmic processes implemented by living
musicians, such as medieval isorhythms or Steve Reich’s phasing techniques.
39
Expressive or linguistic properties are problematic, arguably, only if physicalism in the philosophy of
mind generally is false. I would argue that most standard objections to physicalism in the theory of mind
fail, but it is obviously beyond the scope of this paper to adjudicate on this topic.
40
‘Sounding Objects’.
Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

inputs determined by performers or various environmental contingencies. However,

this view of auditory location is not mandatory and we can hardly expect intuitions
about natural/metaphysical supervenience to be decisive here.
A similar source of indeterminacy shows up if we consider the implications of
different versions of event-theory. O’Callaghan ‘relational event view’ proposes that
sounds consists in the periodic disturbance of a medium.41 Thus, for him, sound
events are caused by vibration events. The distinction is consequential insofar as
each theory delivers different answers to empirical questions about the presence of
sounds. While Casati and Dokic’s view implies that there is a sound located in a
vibrating tuning fork contained in an evacuated jar; O’Callaghan’s implies that there
is none.
Now while this is certainly a difference between these positions, it is hard to see
how it could be resolved in the way ordinary empirical claims concerning auditory
location can be. Most people would probably judge that there is no sound in the
evacuated jar. Yet were the air in a jar containing a vibrating tuning fork to be
regularly evacuated and replenished we might perceive this as an alteration in the
conditions of audition of a continuous sound, rather than the alternating presence and
absence of successive sounds.42 Thus the two theories trade truth values between
particular judgements, while doing seemingly equal justice to the conceptual
framework within which sounds are identified, located and sorted. This along with
the issues of supervenience noted above suggests that there is some metaphysical
slackness in matters of sonic location and the characterisation of sonic events.

6 Conclusion

LETA implies that experiencing sound is the experiencing of changes in a sounding

object (Section 3). It makes no distinction between experiencing sounds and
experiencing sonorous properties since these are the ways sounds happen. We have
already noted that these modes of variation do not correspond to more or less basic
physical quantities like frequency or pressure but involve complex patterns of
change along multiple ‘dimensions’—where the distribution of spectral energy, say,
might constitute but one dimension of timbral variation. Nonetheless LETA qualifies
as physicalist because it entails that these relationships between physical states of
sounding objects are audibilia and not avowedly non-physical properties existen-
tially dependent upon observers’ responses to those objects.
As we have noted, the phenomenology of auditory experience can be ‘slack’
insofar as sounds may be experienced as either unlocated or unrelated to any familiar
causal mechanism. In most cases indeterminacy can be resolved through a
developing cognitive relationship with the sound. Thus neither phenomenological
slack nor the fact that our aesthetic interest often ‘brackets’ auditory location and
causation supports the Schaefferian view that phenomenal sound objects can be
distinguished from the spatially located processes or events which generate auditory
experiences (Section 4). However, some competing metaphysical claims about the

41
Roberto Casati, ‘Sounds’.
42
La philosophie du son, Chapter 3.
 D. Roden

location of sonic events do not seem to be rationally decidable along these lines
(Section 5). Different metaphysical conceptions of sonic events yield various
distributions of truth values to judgements of auditory location and auditory
existence. If there are no decisive considerations favouring one distribution over
another, it seems reasonable to conclude there is no metaphysical fact to the matter
regarding the precise boundaries or locations of sounds.

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