Discussion of J. Kevin O’Regan’s “Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness” Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-20 DOI 10.1007/s13164-012-0090-7 Authors J. Kevin O’Regan, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS - Université Paris Descartes, Centre Biomédical des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75270 Paris cedex 06, France Ned Block, Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, 5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA Journal Review of Philosophy (...) and Psychology Online ISSN 1878-5166 Print ISSN 1878-5158. (shrink)

People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher‐order association of nature with beauty. To test these hypotheses, participants provided aesthetic judgments for nature and urban soundscapes that varied on ease of recognition. Results demonstrated that the aesthetic preference for nature soundscapes (...) was eliminated for the sounds hardest to recognize, and moreover the relationship between aesthetic ratings and several measured acoustic features significantly changed as a function of recognition. In a follow‐up experiment, requiring participants to classify these difficult‐to‐identify sounds into nature or urban categories resulted in a robust preference for nature sounds and a relationship between aesthetic ratings and our measured acoustic features that was more typical of easy‐to‐identify sounds. This pattern of results was replicated with computer‐generated artificial noises, which acoustically shared properties with the nature and urban soundscapes but by definition did not come from these environments. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that the recognition of a sound as either natural or urban dynamically organizes the relationship between aesthetic preference and perceptual features and that these preferences are not inherent to the acoustic features. Implications for nature's role in cognitive and affective restoration are discussed. (shrink)

There is one character too many in the triad sound, event source, thing source. As there are neither phenomenological nor metaphysical grounds for distinguishing sounds and sound sources, we propose to identify them.

Rudolph Koenig's workshop was a busy meeting place for instruments, ideas, experiments, demonstrations, craft traditions, and business. Starting around 1860, it was also the place in Paris where people discovered the new science of sound emerging from the studies of Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany. Koenig built Helmholtz's ideas into apparatus, created new instruments, and spread them throughout the scientific and musical world. Through his own research, he also became Helmholtz's strongest critic. This paper looks at the activities of (...) this unique space and, in particular, how it contributed to the protracted disputes over an elusive acoustical phenomenon called the combination tone. (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 analyses the connections between forms of solitary automobile habitation and the use of mobile sound technologies in automobiles: the radio, cassette, sound system and mobile phone. It does this through an empirically informed analysis of automobile use. In doing so it re-evaluates our understanding of the occupation of space and place, arguing that traditional concepts of urban space have underestimated the active role that the users of these communication technologies might have in transforming the meaning of (...) these spaces as they pass through them. The article points to the powerful, and potentially problematic, role that sound technologies play in the daily experience of moving through the city. (shrink)

Audioscan Milano explores the strategies and experiments in the field of sound and noise of Milan’s legendary Studio di Fonologia Musicale. A multimedia installation composed of hundreds of field recordings of the city of Milan, Audioscan Milano provides its audience with a multisensory experience of the urban soundscape and the opportunity to interact with it digitally. The manipulation of noise and its transformation into musical sound via sophisticated electronic equipment emulates the Studio’s audio techniques but also exposes the (...) reasons behind its failure to attract a wider audience. Visitors to Audioscan Milano expect to hear urban noise rather than musical sounds and, despite some enthusiasm around being able to mix sound objects on the map and move them around the room, they fail to appreciate the technical subtleties of the procedures behind the music. Ultimately, Audioscan Milano constitutes an important link to Italy’s musical heritage of the 1950s and 1960s and can learn from its limitations, particularly when it comes to engaging the audience to play a more active role in the auditory experience of the city. (shrink)

I present an argument for the existence of nonconceptual representational content. The argument is compatible with McDowell's defence of conceptualism against those arguments for nonconceptual content that draw upon claims about the fine‐grainedness of experience. I present a case for nonconceptual content that concentrates on the idea that experience can possess representational content that cannot perform the function of conceptual content, namely figure in the subject's reasons for belief and action. This sort of argument for nonconceptual content is best achieved (...) with examples from auditory perception, especially our perception of music. (shrink)

This essay revolves around a careful assessment of Hui-chieh Loy's essay ?Justification and Debate: Thoughts on Moist Moral Epistemology?. There is much to appreciate in Loy's analysis of the standard of sound doctrine in the ?Against Fatalism? chapters of the Mozi, but a close reading of Loy's essay reveals problematic aspects in his approach along both hermeneutic and logical lines. For one, he groups Mozi's tests of the standard of sound doctrine in a way that does not square (...) well with how they are grouped in the primary text. I call this the problem of alignment. Secondly, he conflates the notions of standard and test. I refer to this as the problem of implementation insofar as such conflation causes the tests to be implemented in a way that they did not seem to be intended to be by Mozi, that is, each on its own as constituting sound doctrine instead of taking them all together as the indicator of sound doctrine. (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)

In ‘The Ockhamization of the event sources of sound’ (2013), Roberto Casati, Elvira Di Bona, and Jérôme Dokic argue that ‘ockhamizing’ Casey O’Callaghan’s account of sounds as proper parts of their event sources yields their preferred view: that sounds are identical with their event sources. This article argues that the considerations Casati et al. marshal in favor of their view are actually stronger considerations in favor of a quite different view: a variant on the Lockean conception of sounds as (...) ‘sensible qualities’ that treats sounds as audible properties of their event sources. (shrink)

Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure—a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes. We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization (...) of ambiguous shapes, using visual and auditory primes. We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round more often following the presentation of a round nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it. (shrink)

This text examines the principles of sound reasoning concerning deduction, induction, and observation brought to bear upon the activity of value judgements. It has practical exercises, to aid application, and avoids technical jargon.

Jean Paul Sartre in his essay, "On 'The Sound and the Fury': Time in the work of Faulkner," states that the technique of the fiction writer always relates back to his metaphysics (OSF 79). Faulkner's clock-based or chronological metaphysics of time found in The Sound and the Fury is the focal point of Sartre's criticism of this work. His main criticism that the novel's metaphysics of time leaves its characters with only pasts and no futures led some Faulkner (...) scholars to seek the future in it while providing their own interpretation of time in Faulkner's work. However, although many of these works were inspired by Sartre's original contribution, none of them have attempted to provide an expanded Sartrean interpretation of the novel's metaphysics of time in light of some of his more elaborate remarks on time and temporality found in Being and Nothingness. The primary purpose of this study is to provide this expanded interpretation by first elucidating Sartre's criticisms of Faulkner's chronological metaphysics found in his original essay, and then analyzing each of the novel's four main sections under Sartre's theory of temporality and emotions. (shrink)

Comparing the early, analytic attempt to define “sound” teaching with the current use of criteria‐based rating schemes, Jeff Stickney turns to Wittgenstein’s holistic, contextualist approach to judging teaching against its complex “background” within our form of life. To exemplify this approach, Stickney presents cases of classroom practice, auditioning dance students, teacher inspection, and mentoring student teachers. These examples highlight problems with the epistemological and criterial construal of teaching, in that both sets of rules tend to constrict unnecessarily the ranges (...) of “reasonable” practice. Shifting to the contextualist approach, according to Stickney, reveals these occluded, political aspects of assessing the “soundness” of teaching and invites a renegotiation of arbitrary limits. (shrink)

Preference utilitarians are concerned to maximize the autonomous choices of individuals; for this reason, they argue that nurses ought to advocate for those patients who desire assistance with ending their lives. This approach prompts us to consider, then, the moral validity of nursing involvement in measures intended to end the lives of patients. In this article, the terms of preference utilitarianism are set out and considered in order to determine whether this approach offers sufficient philosophical support for sanctioning a role (...) for nursing in euthanasia. Ultimately, it is found that preference utilitarianism is lacking in this respect, as well as in its fitness for guiding nursing activity in general. In particular, it is found that nurses are required to exchange a handmaiden relationship with the medical profession for an equally undignified relationship with patients. If nursing involvement in measures intended to end the lives of patients is to find sufficient philosophical support, then we need to look elsewhere. (shrink)

Many philosophers advocate a change in our thinking in order to move beyond an anthropocentric view of the environment. In order to achieve the kind of thinking that makes for sound environmental thinking, we have to look more deeply into the nature of thought and to revise the relation between thought directed outward to the world and thought directed inwardly to thought itself. Only with such insight can we begin to think soundly about the environment. Thought exhibits a characteristic (...) that makes it hard to think environmentally soundly. This characteristic is the inability to think of something without at thesame time making it one’s property. In other words, if sound environmental thinking means moving beyond anthropocentric attitudes and, for example, extending moral categories to creatures other than humans, then we need to address how our thinking turns everything into “mine” before we go about establishing a theory about how that extension should take shape. Hegel is the philosopher who most deeply analyses the inevitable, yet dangerous role of “mining”—in the sense of “making mine,” in the act of thinking. This potentially problematic character of thought risks making a number of otherwise soundenvironmental ways of thinking, unsound. However, we can provide a balance for this problematic characteristic in our thinking. (shrink)

I argue that sounds are best conceived not as pressure waves that travel through a medium, nor as physical properties of the objects ordinarily thought to be the sources of sounds, but rather as events of a certain kind. Sounds are particular events in which a surrounding medium is disturbed or set into wavelike motion by the activities of a body or interacting bodies. This Event View of sounds provides for a uni- ?ed perceptual account of several pervasive sound (...) phenomena, including transmission through barriers, constructive and destructive interference, and echoes. (shrink)

The definition of sonification has been reframed in recent years but remains somewhat in flux; the basic concepts and procedural flows have remained relatively unchanged. Recent definitions have focused on the objective the important uses of sonification in terms of scientific method. The full realization of the potential of the field must also include the craft and art of music composition. The author proposes examining techniques of sonification in a two-order framework: direct and procedural. The impact of new technologies and (...) historical roots of that work argues that framing this broad topic should be in terms inclusive of scientific method and craftsmanship and art. The expressive use of sonic time-based data flows needs to be refined and expanded. The unexamined territory of how a broad-based population of listeners on a subjective, as well as objective level needs, have to be included in this new field. (shrink)

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary associations between word forms and meaning, such as those observed for some properties of sounds and size or shape. Recent evidence suggests that these connections extend to emotional concepts. Here we investigated two types of non-arbitrary relationships. Study 1 examined whether iconicity scores (i.e. resemblance-based mapping between aspects of a word’s form and its meaning) for words can be predicted from ratings in the affective dimensions of valence and arousal and/or the discrete emotions of (...) happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Words denoting negative concepts were more likely to have more iconic word forms. Study 2 explored whether statistical regularities in single phonemes (i.e. systematicity) predicted ratings in affective dimensions and/or discrete emotions. Voiceless (/p/, /t/) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) were related to high arousing words, whereas high arousing negative words tended to include fricatives (/s/, /z/). Hissing consonants were also more likely to occur in words denoting all negative discrete emotions. Additionally, words conveying certain discrete emotions included specific phonemes. Overall, our data suggest that emotional features might explain variations in iconicity and provide new insight about phonemic patterns showing sound symbolic associations with the affective properties of words. (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)

... 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)

Recent debate about the error theory has taken a ‘formal turn’. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the error theory should be rejected because of its difficulties in providing a convincing formal account of the logic and semantics of moral claims. On the other hand, there are those who claim that such formal objections fail, maintaining that arguments against the error theory must be of a substantive rather than a formal kind. In this paper, we argue (...) that formal objections to the error theory cannot be eschewed but must be met head-on. (shrink)

I discuss under what conditions the objection that an expert’s argument is biased by her self-interest can be a meaningful and sound argumentative move. I suggest replacing the idea of bias qua self-interest by that of a conflict of interests, exploit the distinction between an expert context and a public context, and hold that the objection can be meaningful. Yet, the evaluation is overall negative, because the motivational role of self-interest for human behavior remains unclear. Moreover, if recent social-psychological (...) results from the “heuristics and biases” program are accepted, it is plausible to assume that humans also satisfice (rather than optimize/maximize) when identifying and then acting in their self-interest. My thesis is: insofar as the objection is sound with a particular audience, it is not needed; and insofar as the objection is needed, it is unsound. (shrink)