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)

Jean Gabbert Harrell argues persuasively in her book, Soundtracks, that aesthetic theories have often been deficient because they have tried to be too inclusive. That is, the experience of music is profoundly different from that of painting, for instance, and that it is wrong to compare them. Her reasoning for this viewpoint is based in part on a recognition that auditory perception is fully developed in humans prior to either visual or significant tactual perception, bringing a genetic, (...) developmental aspect to her discussion. In its genetic orientation toward sensory development and its concentration exclusively on auditory perception, Soundtracks provides an argument against the relativism of aesthetic judgment in auditory art that has never before been suggested. (shrink)

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the (...) theory’s ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech- and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas’ recognized role in facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its “alerting capacity” and “corporality”, respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system. (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 paper proposes some guidelines for the undeveloped discussion of auditory epistemology. Auditory epistemology is an approach concerned with the perceptual basis for knowledge and belief, specifically around audition. The article pursues two goals. Firstly, it claims that addressing auditory perception from the viewpoint of epistemology is more fruitful than the discussion on phenomenology which has thus far dominated the debates in the literature on sound. Secondly, it elaborates a concrete proposal pertaining to the cooperation of (...) sense-modalities. In so doing, a model for “Perceptual Coherence” is suggested. The first section of the paper critically reviews the problem of perception as it is usually understood in traditional epistemology. An ensuing section outlines the model of perceptual coherence. (shrink)

A neuropsychological perspective on auditory verbal hallucinations links key phenomenological features of the experience, such as voice location and identity, to functionally separable pathways in normal human audition. Although this auditory processing stream framework has proven valuable for integrating research on phenomenology with cognitive and neural accounts of hallucinatory experiences, it has not yet been applied to other symptoms presumed to be closely related to AVH – such as thought insertion. In this paper, I propose that an APS (...) framework offers a useful way of thinking about the experience of TI as well as AVH, providing a common conceptual framework for both. I argue that previous self-monitoring theories struggle to account for both the differences and similarities in the characteristic features of AVH and TI, which can be readily accommodated within an APS framework. Furthermore, the APS framework can be integrated with predictive processing accounts of psychotic symptoms; makes predictions about potential sites of prediction error signals; and may offer a template for understanding a range of other symptoms beyond AVH and TI. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial or phenomenological structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as (...) richly spatial as visual experience—and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. (shrink)

This is the editors' Introduction to a special issue of the journal, Multisensory Research. European philosophers of the modern period found multisensory perception to be impossible because they thought that perceptual ideas are defined by how they are experienced. Under this conception, the individual modalities are determinables of ideas—just as colour is a determinable that embraces red and blue, so also the visual is a determinable that embraces colour and (visually experienced) shape. Since no idea is experienced as, for (...) example, both visual and auditory, there can be no such thing as audiovisual perception. This conception of modality is not directly contested, but a variety of perceptual phenomena are listed that could raise interesting questions if treated as multimodal in origin. (shrink)

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds — a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound — a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hear silence? Or do we just fail to hear, and merely judge or infer that it is silent? This longstanding (...) question remains controversial in both the philosophy and science of perception, with prominent theories holding that sounds are the only objects of auditory experience and thus that our encounter with silence is cognitive, not perceptual. However, this debate has largely remained theoretical, without a key empirical test. Here, we introduce a novel empirical approach, presenting experimental evidence that silence can be genuinely perceived (not just cognitively inferred). We ask whether silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions — empirical signatures of auditory event representation in which auditory events distort perceived duration. Seven experiments introduce three new ‘silence illusions’ — the one-silence-is-more illusion, silence-based warping, and the oddball-silence illusion — each adapted from a prominent perceptual illusion previously thought to arise only from sounds. Subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions. In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds. Our results suggest that silence is truly heard, not merely inferred, introducing a general approach for studying absence perception. (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)

Some philosophers have argued that we do not hear sounds as located in the environment. Others have objected that this straightforwardly contradicts the phenomenology of auditory experience. And from this they draw metaphysical conclusions about the nature of sounds—that they are events or properties of vibrating surfaces rather than waves or sensations. I argue that there is a minimal, but recognizable, notion of audition to which this phenomenal objection does not apply. While this notion doesn’t correspond to our ordinary (...) notion of auditory experience, it does—in conjunction with our lack of an uncontroversial individuation of the senses and recent interest in distinctively multisensory features of perceptual experiences—raise the possibility of more expansive notions of audition, including some that do plausibly count as corresponding to our everyday notion of audition, that lack the spatial phenomenology cited in the objection. Until this possibility is ruled out, the phenomenal objection and metaphysical conclusions drawn from it remain inconclusive. (shrink)

Vision has been the primary focus of naturalistic philosophical research concerning perception and perceptual experience. Guided by visual experience and vision science, many philosophers have focused upon theoretical issues dealing with the perception of objects. Recently, however, hearing researchers have discussed auditory objects. I present the case for object perception in vision, and argue that an analog of object perception occurs in auditory perception. I propose a notion of an auditory object that (...) is stronger than just that of an intentional object of audition, but that does not identify auditory objects with the ordinary material objects we see. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is, firstly, to identify the areas of conceptual confusion about the notion of auditory object that could benefit from a cooperation between philosophy and psychology of perception. Secondly, I try to clarify in what sense there may be individual entities that exist only in time focusing on auditory objects, and to establish what kind of relationship links the existence of such purely temporal entities with the existence of spatiotemporal entities such as (...) bodies or physical objects. Finally, a new definition of auditory object, conceived as a partially mind-dependent object, or Meinongian higher-order object based on inferiora, is discussed. (shrink)

Auditory verbal hallucinations form an essential criterial feature in the schizophrenia definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -IV and International Classification of Diseases -10. In both classificatory systems, the presence of a hallucinatory voice that continuously comments the patient’s behavior or thoughts, or the presence of several voices that discuss the patient with each other, is a sufficient criterion to diagnose schizophrenia. The DSM-IV defines a hallucination as “a sensory perception that has the..

Is speech special? This paper evaluates the evidence that speech perception is distinctive when compared with non-linguistic auditory perception. It addresses the phenomenology, contents, objects, and mechanisms involved in the perception of spoken language. According to the account it proposes, the capacity to perceive speech in a manner that enables understanding is an acquired perceptual skill. It involves learning to hear language-specific types of ethologically significant sounds. According to this account, the contents of perceptual experience when (...) listening to familiar speech are of a variety that is distinctive to hearing spoken utterances. However, perceiving speech involves neither novel perceptual objects nor a unique perceptual modality. Much of what makes speech special stems from our interest in it. (shrink)

Traditional views concerning musical meaning, in the field of philosophy, quite often oscillate around the discussion of whether music can transfer meaning (and if so if it happens by a means similar to language). Philosophers have provided a wide range of views – according to some, music has no meaning whatsoever, or if there is any meaning involved, it is only of a formal/structural significance. According to the opposing views, music can contain meaning similarly to language and what is (...) more, sometimes it can be even richer than language, as in music we are – arguably – able to encode “emotional meanings”. In recent years, several approaches – also speculative – to the old philosophical question have been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, one of the most controversial views being that of Stephen Pinker’s famous metaphor for music as “auditory cheesecake”. This anti-adaptationist view has been challenged f. ex. by Geoffrey Miller or Ian Cross. In this chapter, I enlist some main philosophical views on the titular problem and investigate some evolutionary-paradigm-based propositions for its solution, to examine whether – both from explanatory and methodological standpoints – the philosophy of music could gain something from recent developments in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The contribution of recent theories of sound and audition has been extremely significant for the development of a philosophy of auditory perception; however, none tackle the question of how our consciousness of auditory states arises. My goal is to show how consciousness about our auditory experience gets triggered. I examine a range of auditory mental phenomena to show how we are able to capture qualitative distinctions of auditory sensations. I argue that our consciousness (...) of auditory states consists in having thoughts that organize our experience. Although my proposals could be adapted to fit with other theories of consciousness, here I expand David Rosenthal’s high-order-thought theory and his quality-space theory, and show their usefulness for analyzing our auditory experience. I use quality-space to account for pitch, timbre, loudness, and sound location. I further show that our high-order-thoughts capture qualitative aspects of our auditory sensations. I conclude by demonstrating how a hypothetical listener in possession of a refined vocabulary describes and reports her high-order-thoughts about her musical experience. (shrink)

It seems plausible that visual experiences of darkness have perceptual phenomenal content that clearly differentiates them from absences of visual experiences. I argue, relying on psychological results concerning auditory attention, that the analogous claim is true about auditory experiences of silence. More specifically, I propose that experiences of silence present empty spatial directions like ‘right’ or ‘left’, and so have egocentric spatial content. Furthermore, I claim that such content is genuinely auditory and phenomenal in the sense that (...) one can, in principle, recognize that one is experiencing silence. This position is far from obvious, as the majority of theories concerning silence perception do not ascribe perceptual phenomenal content to experiences of silence. (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 word akoumena succinctly refers to the main focus of the book, which is the natural philosophy of human hearing from the perspective of intellectual history of science and of philosophy, with a theoretical emphasis on phenomenology. The word akoumena suggests a move away from the language of vision which has been predominant throughout Western thought, both in the modern natural sciences and in Western metaphysics.

Cet ouvrage est dans la continuite de la reflexion de Santiago Espinosa, qui etend ses vues sur la musique a l'art en general, et qui aborde des sujets plus vastes comme la science physique (l'auteur fait observer que les scientifiques contemporains adoptent la perspective critiquee des lors qu'ils cherchent a faire une image de l'univers). A cette perspective, Espinosa oppose la perception auditive, plus prompte a saisir le mouvement et le changement, non susceptible par surcroit d'en faire une image (...) ou meme une chose. Il fait remarquer l'interet de certains philosophes pour l'intuition du silence de l'interpretation, aucune chose ne pouvant etre le signe (ou l'image) d'une autre, n'etant que ce qu'elle est, ou plutot devient. Il revient enfin a la mise en rapport de la perspective imaginative et les affections de l'angoisse, la melancolie et la nausee afin de montrer que ces dernieres relevent parfois de l'illusion que les choses semblent, dans la mesure ou elles sont prises pour des images, se repeter sans cesse. Pour l'ouie, sensible a la singularite de ce qui passe, tout ce qui arrive est en revanche d'une surprenante nouveaute, ce qui, pour l'affirmateur de la realite, peut se reveler etre aussi une source de joie. (shrink)

I will investigate the auditory illusion of continuity, which is the phenomenon of auditory occlusion in which we are able to hear a sound as continuous even though it has been masked by another sound. This phenomenon seems to have a perceptual nature when it occurs in the context of everyday sounds, while it seems to have a cognitive nature when it occurs in the context of speech sounds. This difference has the following consequences: (1) We need to (...) have a differentiated approach to the study of this phenomenon; (2) the perceptual explanation of the phenomenon involving everyday sounds indicates that everyday sounds can be auditorily perceived; and (3) the cognitive explanation of the phenomenon involving speech sounds suggests, instead, that semantic properties cannot be auditorily perceived. From (2) and (3) it follows that while we have a good argument for the rich view when focusing on everyday sounds, we seem to lack an analogous argument to support the rich view in the context of speech sounds. Thus, I will suggest a new argument for the view that we do not hear semantic properties, as language understanding seems to be primarily a cognitive ability. (shrink)

The method of contrast is used within philosophy of perception in order to demonstrate that a specific property could be part of our perception. The method is based on two passages. I argue that the method succeeds in its task only if the intuition of the difference, which constitutes the core of the first passage, has two specific traits. The second passage of the method consists in the evaluation of the available explanations of this difference. Among the (...) three outlined options, I will demonstrate that only in the third option – as we shall see, the case of the scenario that remains the same but is perceived in two different ways by the same perceiver – the intuition purports a difference that posses the necessary characteristics, namely being immediately evident and extremely complex and multifaceted, which determine its tensive nature. The application within auditory perception of this third option will generate two cases, a diachronic one and a synchronic one, which clearly show that we can auditorily perceive causality as a link between two sonorous episodes. The causal explanation is the only possible explanation among the many evaluated within the second passage of the method of contrast. (shrink)

It is a commonly held view that auditory perception functions to tell us about sounds and their properties. In this paper I argue that this common view is mistaken and that auditory perception functions to tell us about the objects that are the sources of sounds. In doing so, I provide a general theory of auditory perception and use it to give an account of the content of auditory experience and of the nature (...) of sounds. (shrink)

Aesthetic judgment has often been characterized as a sensuous cognitively unmediated engagement in sensory items whether visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory or gustatory. However, new art forms challenge this assumption. At the very least, new art forms provide evidence of intention which triggers a search for meaning in the perceiver. Perceived order excites the ascription of intention. The ascription of intention employs background knowledge and experience, or in other words, implicates the perceiver’s conceptual framework. In our response to art of (...) every description we witness the incorrigible tendency in humans to construct meaningful narratives to account for events. Such meaningful narratives always implicitly involve the ascription of intention, even when the agent of the intention is not explicitly acknowledged or even clearly conceived. This principle of intention-in-order may seem incompatible with another truism which is that art is a source of novel ideas and essentially a critique of prevailing values and norms including conceptual schemes. I argue on the contrary that the human impulse to read intention in order is a precondition of art’s critical edge. Creativity is possible even though there is no raw perceptual data to which we have conscious access. That is, there are no sensory items, unmediated by the concepts we have internalized through our interaction with our communities, to which we have conscious access. (shrink)

Everyday media consumption leaves no doubt that the perception of moving images from various media is characterized by experience and understanding. Corresponding research in this field has shown that the stimulus patterns flooding in on us are not only processed mentally, but also bodily. Building on this, the following study argues that incoming stimuli are processed not only visually, but multimodally, with all senses, and moreover affectively. The classical binding of a sensory organ to a medium, on whose delimitation (...) the common understanding of multimodality is based, is thus abolished. Can arguments for this assumption be found? Building on the research of cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer and his successors, the two American philosophers Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois, and supported by research from the life sciences in which, in parallel, the arts also play an important role in understanding image formation, as in the work of Heinz Werner and, following on from this, in the more recent research of the child psychologist Daniel N. Stern in collaboration with mirror neuron research by the group of neuroscientists around Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, justifications for this will be provided. What the multimodal processing of film images is concretely based on will finally be made clear by means of an exemplary analysis of a video film by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. It aims to prove, that the prerequisites for the thesis can only lie in the fact, that both the modes of perception (visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory) as well as the medially conditioned modes of image formation are based on non-discursive, formal-abstract structures that are also processed affectively. At the same time, the analysis thus shows how the selection and composition of the vital experienced forms can provide information about the socio-culturally shaped self-image of the producer and the viewer. (shrink)

Acts of perception are shown to be based on dynamic drives and interests, And so to be parts of purposive acts. A number of consequences follow. For instance, In distal auditory or visual perceptions there are two objects--The transcendent object of the distant goal and source of stimulation, And the immediate sensory object with its anticipatory references. This leads to an operational-Correspondence theory of truth to verify the references. Passive traditional theories are confused on this and other relevant (...) points. (shrink)

... 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)

ABSTRACT It is often observed that experiences of utterance understanding are what surfaces in hearer’s consciousness in the course of language comprehension. The nature of such experiences has been a hotly debated topic. One influential position in this debate is the semantic perceptual view, according to which meaning properties can be perceived. In this paper I present two new challenges for the view that we can become perceptually aware of meaning properties in auditory experience or, in brief, that we (...) can hear meanings. The first challenge concerns the issue of providing a plausible model of meaning perception. The second challenge consists in accommodating the crucial role of cognition in the etiology of such experiences. Drawing on these observations, I will suggest a new account, according to which experiences of understanding have a complex, mixed nature involving both perceptual and cognitive elements. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present and analyze problems associated with the mechanisms of auditory perception (especially those responsible for speech perception), their specific disorders and functions. I discuss research on speech perception in the broader theoretical context of the mechanistic model of scientific explanation and the perspective of cognitive implantology that explores the possibilities for building hybrid auditory systems.

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)

A Martian reading contemporary work on perception might be forgiven for thinking that humans had only one sense: vision. Witness the title of one popular recent collection: Vision and mind: selected readings in the philosophy of perception. Our obsession with sight is stifling. It leads to distorted vision-based models of the other senses, and it means that the distinctive puzzles raised by non-visual modalities are routinely neglected. With this pioneering and long-overdue collection of essays on auditory (...) perception, Nudds and O’Callaghan aim to start correcting this state of affairs. They deserve much praise, not least for their own substantial contributions and splendid introduction. (shrink)

It is common to assume that if Locke is to be regarded as a consistent epistemologist he must be read as holding that either ideas are the objects of perception or that (physical) objects are. He must either be a direct realist or a representationalist. But perhaps, paradoxical as it at first sounds, there is no reason to suppose that he could not hold both to be true. We see physical objects and when we do so we have ideas. (...) We see or hear birds and bells but we also have visual and auditory ideas of birds and bells. This suggestion is explored through examination of what Locke says about perception in his Elements of Natural Philosophy and the accounts offered both by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and by some of Locke's successors. (shrink)

Leibniz, Husserl and the Brain is about the structural relations between phenomenological and neurophysiological aspects of perception, consciousness and time. Its focus lies with auditory perception, since nearly all perceived qualities in hearing - such as pitch, rhythm and the localization or origin of a sound - are most intimately related to temporal patterns and regularities. Here striking analogies are shown between the structural features of perceptual states, as dealt with in philosophical phenomenology, and of their physical (...) counterparts, as dealt with in neurophysiology. Accordingly, the comprehensive and consolidating references to the work of Leibniz and Husserl are not for philological reasons, but, rather, to work towards philosophical orientation in a conceptual maze. They allow for a fresh view on several issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and also in psychophysics - in particular, on the transition from unconscious to conscious states and on the constitution of time consciousness. (shrink)

This chapter explores to what extent some core ideas of predictive processing can be applied to the phenomenology of time consciousness. The focus is on the experienced continuity of consciously perceived, temporally extended phenomena (such as enduring processes and successions of events). The main claim is that the hierarchy of representations posited by hierarchical predictive processing models can contribute to a deepened understanding of the continuity of consciousness. Computationally, such models show that sequences of events can be represented as states (...) of a hierarchy of dynamical systems. Phenomenologically, they suggest a more fine-grained analysis of the perceptual contents of the specious present, in terms of a hierarchy of temporal wholes. Visual perception of static scenes not only contains perceived objects and regions but also spatial gist; similarly, auditory perception of temporal sequences, such as melodies, involves not only perceiving individual notes but also slightly more abstract features (temporal gist), which have longer temporal durations (e.g., emotional character or rhythm). Further investigations into these elusive contents of conscious perception may be facilitated by findings regarding its neural underpinnings. Predictive processing models suggest that sensorimotor areas may influence these contents. (shrink)

Hearing and auditory perception are rapidly developing topics in the philosophy of perception. Recent work has focused on characterizing what we hear and on similarities and differences between audition and other modalities. Future work should address how theorizing about audition impacts theorizing about perception more generally. This entry concerns questions about the objects and contents of hearing. It includes discussion of the spatial content of audition, of the role of time and pitch in the individuation (...) of auditory objects, and of audition's role in the perception of speech. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions on cognition (ranging from computational and representational approaches to the 4E fra-mework), on the one hand, and those on sound and auditory per-ception, on the other, have hitherto remained apart. In this paper, the author addresses the concept of “auditory cognition”. While committing to the conceptual analysis of the latter, the author in-troduces the discussion of modality-specif ic approaches. Since the contributions made so far in the domain of the philosophy of sound and auditory (...) perception are prone to favor computational-repre-sentational approaches —e.g., the perceptual coherence model (Méndez-Martínez, 2022)—, the exploration of 4E possibilities will lay down a series of questions aimed to encourage future developers from that viewpoint. In that sense, the author explores conceptual entailments and connections between the genealogy of theories within the philosophy of sound and auditory perception, and the hypothesis of the extended cognition (EX). (shrink)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and ... V. Influence of imaged pictures and sounds on detection of visual and auditory signals. ...

We can easily discriminate self-produced from externally generated sensory signals. Recent studies suggest that the prediction of the sensory consequences of one’s own actions made by forward model can be used to attenuate the sensory effects of self-produced movements, thereby enabling a differentiation of the self-produced sensation from the externally generated one. The present study showed that attenuation of sensation occurred both when participants themselves performed a goal-directed action and when they observed experimenter performing the same action, although they clearly (...) reported that the tones were produced by other during action observation and by themselves during their own action. These results suggest that sensory prediction of action modulates ongoing auditory processing irrespective of who produces the sounds and that the explicit judgment of agency does not necessarily rely on the same mechanisms on which implicit perceptual measures such as sensory attenuation rely. (shrink)