A little philosophy of sound, learning differences, racism, Spinoza, pen pal letters, love songs, and more during a global pandemic, massive social change and social justice movements, the rise of the legitimacy of the science of metaphysics, shamans, wolves, notes and interferences as I prepare to leave academia.

... ISBN0199215928 ... -/- Abstract: Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science traditionally has focused on a visual model. This book presents a systematic treatment of sounds and auditory experience. It demonstrates how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships among multiple sense modalities enriches our understanding of perception. It articulates the central questions that comprise the philosophy of sound, and proposes a novel theory of sounds and their perception. Against the widely (...) accepted philosophical view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, and against the scientific view that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium such as air or water, the book argues that sounds are events in which objects or interacting bodies disturb a surrounding medium. This does not imply that sounds propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near their sources. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time and situates sounds in the world. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities. It also provides a powerful account of echoes, interference, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories. Investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. This book concludes by arguing that a surprising class of cross-modal perceptual illusions demonstrates that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that a visuocentric model for theorizing about perception — according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry — ought to be abandoned. -/- . (shrink)

From the winds of Mars to a baby's first laugh, a prolific philosopher-composer reflects on the profound imperative of sound in everyday life. Experiencing Sound presents its subject, the one sense we can never stop using, as fundamental to all experience-sensation, perception, and understanding. Lawrence Kramer turns on its head the widespread notion that vision takes pride of place among the senses and demonstrates how paying attention to sound can transform how we make meaning out of experience. (...) Through a series of brief, lyrical forays, Experiencing Sound shows that sound is the object of a primary need and an essential component in the sensation of being alive and the perception of time. It is something that we may suffer-or be made to suffer-as well as enjoy. Like its predecessor, The Hum of the World, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, literature, art, media, and history, from classical antiquity to the present, as it invites us to experience sound anew. (shrink)

Exploring a wide range of sonic practices, from birdsong in the Marshall Islands to Zulu ululation, the contributors reorient the field of sound studies toward the global South in order to rethink and decolonize modes of understanding and listening to sound.

A discussion of the topics of curation, geography, and material production in the context of sound studies and the sonic world.

This paper sketches the antilogism of Christine Ladd-Franklin and historical advancement about antilogism, mainly constructs an axiomatic system Atl based on first-order logic with equality and the wholly-exclusion and not-wholly-exclusion relations abstracted from the algebra of Ladd-Franklin, with soundness and completeness of Atl proved, providing a simple and convenient tool on syllogistic reasoning. Atl depicts the empty class and the whole class differently from normal set theories, e.g. ZFC, revealing another perspective on sets and set theories. Two series of Dotterer (...) and the theorem proved by Russinoff are re-characterized in antilogistic formulas corresponding to the square of opposition and twenty-four moods of syllogism. Then the restricted equivalence between two forms of antilogism and minimal inconsistency is built up, implying the internal connection between antilogisms and minimal inconsistency and leaving two related conjectures not proved. Besides, this paper provides a new explanation for the reason why contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation and the nine special moods require the non-empty assumption. (shrink)

Mozart's skull -- The case of the purloined partitur -- A tale of two authenticities -- Ancient authenticities -- Operatic authenticity -- Messiah's message -- Is nothing sacred? -- Sound in sound -- Music, science, and semantics -- Authorial intention and the pure musical parameters -- Leonard Meyer's sonata.

In Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, authors pose exciting challenges and provide fresh opportunities for scholars, scientists, environmental activists, and musicians to consider music and sound from ecological standpoints. The book covers topics such as how environment enables music and sound, how music and sound relate to Western environmental science, and mutidisciplinary collaborations among scholars.

This book redefines religious studies as a field in which a plurality of disciplines interact. A social science when understood as a body of knowledge, religion is also marked by discovery, appreciation, orientation, and application--an interplay of the arts and sciences. Teaching religious studies involves the question of the occupation of territories and disentangling occupation from violence.

This book is a comprehensive overview of what sound means in this century. It's primary argument is that sound is the newest sense, having been elevated with the advent of sound recording approximately 100 years ago. With chapters ranging from sound recording to the acquisition of language, this study is meant to engage readers on what the author argues is our primary sense. Chapters on the weaponization of sound, sound refuges, and sound design (...) are also part of these extensive study by a scholar focused on contemporary rhetoric and mass media. (shrink)

The rich conceptual and experiential relays between music and philosophy—echoes of what Theodor W. Adorno once called _Klangfiguren_, or "sound figures"—resonate with heightened intensity during the period of modernity that extends from early German Idealism to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This volume traces the political, historical, and philosophical trajectories of a specifically German tradition in which thinkers take recourse to music, both as an aesthetic practice and as the object of their speculative work. The contributors (...) examine the texts of such highly influential writers and thinkers as Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bloch, Mann, Adorno, and Lukács in relation to individual composers including Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg, and Eisler. Their explorations of the complexities that arise in conceptualizing music as a mode of representation and philosophy as a mode of aesthetic practice thematize the ways in which the fields of music and philosophy are altered when either attempts to express itself in terms defined by the other. Contributors: Albrecht Betz, Lydia Goehr, Beatrice Hanssen, Jost Hermand, David Farrell Krell, Ludger Lütkehaus, Margaret Moore, Rebekah Pryor Paré, Gerhard Richter, Hans Rudolf Vaget, Samuel Weber. (shrink)

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first comprehensive study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. While our modern western culture is almost an entirely visual one, hearing and sound were central to ancient Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy. Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as (...) Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, music, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece. (shrink)

A musical experience is marked by the synthesis of passion and rationality, emotion and understanding, and body and mind. Ferrara demonstrates that each method of musical analysis confines musical significance to a single level. He devises an "eclectic method" that provides bridges for musical sound, form, and reference. In response to the multiplicity of levels of musical significance Ferrara's eclectic method draws upon a wide-ranging number of conventional and nonconventional approaches to musical analysis which results in a dialectic of (...) methods. (shrink)

This article intends, firstly, to enrich the study of the role that the concept of tone plays in Kantian idea of reason, by extending it to the analysis of music as art of sounds, which the Critique of Judgment fulfills. Secondly, it aims to determine the grounds that could explain why the mathematics, due to the specificity of the philosophical method and the physical reception of music, respectively, are itself incapable to express the procedures of reason and of the art (...) of sounds. Finally, it points out a similarity between reason and music concerning their common rejection of succumbing to the Schwärmerei, although the distance which divides them as two contrary ways to exercise and promote the life and its feeling.O artigo tenciona, primeiramente, enriquecer o estudo da função que o conceito de tom desempenha na ideia kantiana de razão, ao estendê-lo à análise da música como arte dos sons que a Crítica do Juízo contém. Em segundo lugar, propõe-se determinar os motivos pelos quais a matemática se revela incapaz, devido à especificidade do método filosófico e à corporalidade da recepção musical, respectivamente, de expressar o modo de proceder da razão e da arte dos sons. Finalmente, aponta-se para uma semelhança entre música e razão, no que diz respeito à rejeição que compartilham da queda na Schwärmerei, apesar da distância que se estabelece entre ambas enquanto duas maneiras contrárias de exercitar e fomentar a vida e o sentimento dela. (shrink)

Sounds and Perception brings together original essays on auditory perception and the nature of sounds - an emerging area of interest in the philosophy of mind and perception, and in the metaphysics of sensible qualities. The essays discuss a wide range of issues, including the nature of sound, the spatial aspects of auditory experience, hearing silence, musical experience, and the perception of speech; a substantial introduction by the editors serves to contextualise the essays and make connections between them. (...) The collection serves both as an introduction to the nature of auditory perception and as the definitive resource for coverage of the main questions that constitute the philosophy of sounds and audition. (shrink)

A brief review of Peter Kivy's collection of eleven essays on Philosophy of Music.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Introduction -- Beginnings. Elements and matter ; Aristoxenus' elements of music ; Transmission and reception ; Elements, letters, notes -- Matter and material. Dissonant material ; Sound and composition ; Given or constructed? ; Timbre, noise, and language -- Time and rhythm. Material and modernity ; Taking place ; Aperiodic rhythms ; Quasiperiodic forms -- Sounds and instruments. Pitched bodies ; Sounds without bodies ; Referennce ; Agent and reproducibility ; Sonocentrism -- Musical bodies. Bodies without sounds ; Composing (...) a gesture -- Conclusions. (shrink)

In recent years, some eminent scientists have argued that free will, as commonly understood, is an illusion. Given that questions such as ‘do we have free will?’ were once pursued solely by philosophers, how should science and philosophy coalesce here? Do philosophy and science simply represent different phases of a particular investigation—the philosopher concerned with formulating a specific question and the scientist with empirically testing it? Or should the interactions between the two be more involved? Contemporary responses to (...) such questions have occasionally given rise to conflict amongst members of different disciplines. Some individual scientists have dismissed philosophical objections to their scientific theories on the grounds that the philosopher lacks experience in their respective field. And some individual philosophers have rejected scientific theories on a priori grounds, without giving due consideration to the empirical evidence. In this paper, I argue that such dismissiveness, on both sides, is mistaken. I will do so by putting forward a view that is inspired by the American philosopher and psychologist William James, who has been characterised by recent commentators as having performed ‘boundary work’. Boundary work involves transgressing the dividing lines between such disciplines, and attempting to solve certain problems without being restricted to the methodology of a single discipline. To help support this position, I will examine a series of contemporary problems that are pursued in both philosophy and science that relate to moral responsibility and free will. I will argue that in order to solve such problems we need to perform boundary work. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to revive wave theory in the philosophy of sound. Wave theory identifies sounds with compression waves. Despite its wide acceptance in the scientific community as the default position, many philosophers have rejected wave theory and opted for different versions of distal theory instead. According to this current majority view, a sound has its stationary location at its source. I argue against this and other alternative philosophical theories of sound and develop wave theory into (...) a more defensible form. Philosophers of sound tend to emphasise how sounds are experienced to be in their arguments. Most often, it is assumed that that which appears to be a distally located bearer of auditory properties in an auditory experience is a sound. Chapter 1 argues that if this distal entity is the sound source instead, many of the existing theories of sound will be severely affected. Chapter 2 discusses auditory perception and criticises the common assumption that we hear non-sound entities in virtue of hearing sounds. I show that this assumption begs the question against certain theories of sound and that the contrary view that sound sources can be directly heard is more plausible. If sound sources can be directly heard, then features commonly attributed to sounds based on auditory experiences might rather be features of sound sources. I examine eight of such features in Chapter 3. Only four of them survive. Chapters 4 and 5 review the existing theories of sound. After a taxonomy of existing theories of sound, each theory is criticised one-by-one. Some of them are problematic precisely because they rely on the implausible assumption that that which appears to be distally located in an auditory experience is a sound rather than a sound source. Lastly, Chapter 6 focuses on wave theory. It begins with two positive arguments for wave theory in general, followed by my replies to two common objections in the literature. I then move on to develop my version of wave theory. There are two core aspects of my view. The first one is a metaphysics of compression waves; the second is an account of what it is to hear compression waves. After comparing my view with a similar theory, I demonstrate the explanatory power of my view in two steps. First, the eight commonly accepted features of sounds examined in Chapter 3 are revisited. It turns out that my view can accommodate all of them. Second, explanations for four special sound-related phenomena are offered at the end of the chapter. I conclude in the last chapter with the suggestion that, as a philosopher, the best way to defend wave theory is to offer a better understanding of auditory perception which explains how compression waves are experienced. (shrink)

A philosophical analysis of sonically charged concepts to map a theory of "sound affects.".

This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the (...) fact that beyond hearing and listening we 'audit' sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of 'sound studies.' To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound--including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence--to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialog, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds : The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Sounding the Abyss achieves an analysis that extends Cavell's already rich range of work into surprising new directions in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and general cultural criticism. The work never strays from its concern with reassessing the divide between philosophy's analytic and Continental factions.

The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The (...) article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon. (shrink)

Whilst arguing for sounds as repeatable objects does not seem suitable to our auditory experience, considering them as events can then help us understand some of their main features. In this sense, sounds are events happening to material objects; they have a beginning and an end; they are ephemeral entities that we cannot grasp as ordinary objects. Nevertheless, supporters of event theory usually focus on the autonomous status that sounds manifest from the things in the world. Conversely, when we hear (...) sounds, we hear what and where they are sounding even in those theories that I will call detached-sound theories; in hearing them we hear how different materials create different sounds. Within the different positions of the event theory to pure-event or acousmatic proposal, the importance and role that the material has in the creation of diverse sounds does not always seem to be recognized. In this paper, I therefore aim to show how the materiality of resonating bodies and objects is given in all forms of auditory experience, not until analyzed the differences between object and event accounts in the philosophy of sound. (shrink)

This book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the future of acoustics, especially in the dialectic context of sound and silence-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the multilateral theory of acoustics) to go beyond the existing approaches in the literature on acoustics in an original way.

Sound Unseen explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound-a sound that one hears without seeing its source-and presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses.

... composed by Herms Niel as a Durchhaltefanfare, a fanfare of perseverance, for the German troops that had been surrounded on the Crimea peninsula by ...

Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a (...) more recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions. (shrink)

This essay offers an introduction to Hegel's philosophy of sound as elaborated in the 1830 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. The first section begins with essential context for interpreting the a priori status of nature and sound in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Next, I develop a general account of the Aristotelian character of Hegel's ‘Physics’, and a commentary on the categories of specific gravity and cohesion leading up to sound (and heat) in (...) the ‘Physics of Particular Individuality’. The second section provides an exegetical portrait of Hegel's metaphysics of sound. I first reconstruct Hegel's ontology of sound from the subsection on ‘Sound’ (Der Klang), and then outline his theory of auditory perception. The third section compares Hegel's philosophy of sound to leading views in contemporary philosophy of sound. I argue that Hegel offers a hylomorphic version of a located event theory of sound, which I suggest is more phenomenologically adequate than the modern acoustic view, and more metaphysically consistent than other distal event theories of sound. (shrink)

How is it possible for sounds to be sound? The evanescence of sounds seems to provide us with no more than a fragile foundation, even if echo and resonance offer fleeting extensions of sonic moments. Historians of the senses have told us that despite the importance of audition and orality in antiquity and the Middle Ages, modernity has privileged vision, and this predilection has accompanied and buttressed modern attempts in science and philosophy to provide a firm foundation for (...) knowledge. The development of sound studies in the last two or three decades has subtly—and progressively more explicitly—begun to propose a shift in how a foundation, a ground, could be conceived. What is the nature of this shift?We need... (shrink)

Sounding Fragilities enacts a polyphony of writing on contemporary composition, music and performing arts in relation to music theatre. Co-edited by a theatre and performance scholar and by a composer and artistic researcher, this anthology considers its field of investigation through the lens of positionalities. Irene Lehmann and Pia Palme invite readers into intimate encounters with an artist's practice, feminist and queer perspectives, and personal explorations into aspects of musicology, theatre studies, technology and ecology. By presenting female* composers who write (...) with/through/about their own practice, Sounding Fragilities is a remarkable contribution to an interdisciplinary debate around the agency of artistic research. With this synthesis, the editors evaluate how moving beyond the binary of art and science reveals the rich yet fragile territories of artistic knowledge-production and literacy in music theatre. Sounding Fragilities: An Anthology brings together essays, discussions and interventions on contemporary music, dance and music theatre to offer a polyphony of new approaches to listening, watching, composing and performing. Artistic and academic researchers present reflections and insights into the fragilities of artistic materials, collaborations and the communities that build around live performances. Challenging the idea of isolated composers, choreographers, audience members and academic researchers, they stress instead the interconnectedness of these positions as indispensable elements of thriving performance and research. This feature of all live performance is envisaged by several of the book's contributors as linked to political, democratic thought and ecological or feminist thinking. (shrink)

Light song (a text score) -- Introduction : writing fragments -- The political possibility of sound -- Hearing volumes : architecture, light and words -- Geographies of sound : performing impossible territories -- Morality of the invisible, ethics of the inaudible -- Hearing subjectivities : bodies, forms and formlessness -- Sonic materialism : a philosophy of digging -- Reading fragments of listening, hearing vertical lines of words -- Putting on lipstick (a text score).

What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is (...) a book about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age. (shrink)

Sound and Grammar: A Neo-Sapirian Theory of Language by Susan F. Schmerling offers an original overall linguistic theory based on the work of the early American linguist Edward Sapir, supplemented with ideas from the philosopher-logicians Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Richard Montague and the linguist Elisabeth Selkirk. The theory yields an improved understanding of interactions among different aspects of linguistic structure, resolving notorious issues directly inherited by current theory from (post- ) Bloomfieldian linguistics. In the theory presented here, syntax is a (...) filter on a phonological algebra, not a linguistic level; linguistic expressions are phonological structures, and syntax is semantically relevant relations among phonological structures. The book shows how Neo-Sapirian grammar sheds new light on syntax-phonology interactions in English, German, French, and Spanish. (shrink)

The book proposes a multi-dimensional understanding on sound and listening as capacities for challenging social and political structures of inequality and domination, supporting interpersonal exchange and modes of community-building based on empathy, care and compassion.

L’obiettivo di questo articolo è mostrare come le recenti pratiche artistiche della “sound art” svolgano un ruolo rilevante nell’illustrare sensibilmente attraverso le loro opere alcuni differenti aspetti del dibattito sull’ontologia del suono e sulla fenomenologia dell’ascolto sonoro. La riflessione filosofica in questo campo è ricca di posizioni teoriche alternative e contrastanti. Tali modelli trovano corrispettivi nell’esperienza estetica della sound art, che dunque si può mostrare essere sin dalle sue origini una vera e propria esplorazione applicata sulla natura del (...) suono e del suo rapporto con l’ascoltatore. Il sound artist manipola l’esperienza sensoriale del suono, ne fa emergere gli aspetti nascosti, ristruttura il nostro modo di percepirlo, dirige e focalizza l’attenzione del fruitore. In tal senso potremmo definire la sound art come una forma di campo sperimentale e artistico complementare al dibattito filosofico tradizionale sul suono. (shrink)

A fundamental concept of a philosophy of music is that of sound. Any investigation of this concept has to be ontologically as well as epistemically adequate. The main proposition of the article is that sounds can only be understood ontologically if we take into consideration their main characteristic of being strictly shapeless and lacking content, an insight that we can learn from Kant. In contradiction to Kant, sounds can be epistemologically characterized as objects that can only be re-presented (...) if the hearer co-presents their temporal extension. The argument is developed through a discussion of the work of P. F. Strawson, G. Evans, R. Scruton, and H. Riemann. (shrink)

Both Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl addressed sound while trying to explain the inner consciousness of time and gave to it the status of a supporting example. Although their inquiries were not aimed at clarifying in detail the nature of the auditory experience or sounds themselves, they made some interesting observations that can contribute to the current philosophical discussion on sounds. On the other hand, in analytic philosophy, while inquiring the nature of sounds, their location, auditory experience or (...) the audible qualities and so on, the representatives of that trend of thought have remained silent about the depiction of sound and the auditory phenomena in the phenomenological tradition. The paper’s intention is to relate both endeavours, yet the perspective carried out is that of analytic philosophy and, thus, I pay special attention to conceptual analysis as a methodological framework. In this sense, I first explain what sound ontology is in the context of analytic philosophy and the views that it encompasses— namely, the Property View (PV), the Wave View (WV) and the Event View (EV)—. Secondly, I address the problems it entails, emphasising that of sound individuation. In a third section, I propose the possibly controversial conjunction of a “Brentano-Husserl Analysis of the Consciousness of Time” (for short “Brentano-Husserl analysis”) and outline the commonalities of both authors, without ignoring its discrepancies. My main focus is Husserl’s 1905 Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins. While addressing the Brentano-Husserl analysis, I elaborate on the problem of temporal and spatial extension (Raumlichkeit and Zeitlichkeit, respectively) of both consciousness and sound. Such comparison is a key one, since after these two developments, one can notice some theoretical movements concerning the shift of attention from sounds to the unity of consciousness, and how they mirror each other. After examining the controversial claims concerning the temporal and spatial extension of both consciousness and sound, I argue in the concluding paragraphs that while considering the accounts of sound ontology, the Brentano-Husserl analysis would probably endorse a Property View and that this could have interesting consequences for the issue of Sound Individuation. (shrink)

A widespread view among philosophers and scientists is that recorded sounds and assisted hearing differ fundamentally from natural sounds and direct hearing. It is commonly claimed, for example, that the sounds we hear over the phone are not sounds emitted by the voice of our interlocutor, but the sounds reproduced by the phone’s loudspeaker. According to this view, hearing distant sounds through communication and audio equipment is at best indirect and at worst illusory. In what follows, I shall reject these (...) claims and argue in favor of a transparent view of auditory media, including radio, telephone, phonograph, etc. According to this approach, the great gift of Scott de Martinville and Edison is not to have invented devices able to reproduce vanished sounds but rather to have created technological instruments literally able to store and transmit them to future and distant listeners. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts sound examples and links to further resources. The collection is organized around six main themes: Sounding Art: The notion of sounding art, (...) its relation to sound studies, and its evolution and possibilities. Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing about sound. Listening and Memory: Listening from different perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and technologically mediated listening. Acoustic Spaces, Identities and Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound. Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute methodologically and epistemologically to historiography. Sound Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way we make and access music has changed. With contributions from leading scholars and cutting-edge researchers, The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art is an essential resource for anyone studying the intersection of sound and art. (shrink)