Abstract
Frequently, we learn of the locations of things and events in our environment by means of hearing. Hearing, I argue, is a locational mode of perceiving with a robustly spatial phenomenology. I defend three proposals. First, audition furnishes one with information about the locations of things and happenings in one’s environment because auditory experience itself has spatial content—auditory experience involves awareness of space. Second, we hear the locations of things and events by or in hearing the locations of their sounds. Third, we auditorily experience sounds themselves as having relatively stable distal locations. I reject skepticism about spatial audition and auditory experience tracing to Strawson’s Individuals, and suggest that spatial auditory experience grounds a form of perceptual access to objects and events that is critical to negotiating one’s environment.
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Notes
Though I am most concerned specifically with the spatial and locational aspects of such beliefs, formed on the strength of audition, the explanation stemming from my proposal need not be exhaustive. Further conditions concerning, for example, the role of auditory recognition and identification of sound sources, might be required. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing this point.
Some headphones are capable of delivering a relatively realistic rendering of auditory space, including externalized sound images. Such headphones are often expensive, since the very best examples require customized fitting and signal processing that incorporates modeling of the wearer’s pinnae. This is because signal transformations that depend upon reflections due to ear shape and head position are important cues to realistic spatial hearing. Less sophisticated designs can sometimes produce reasonable sound imaging, though this still requires powerful signal processing.
By “stable” I mean that the sounds do not seem to change locations. One might substitute “stationary”. This does not imply, for instance, that no other changes seem to take place at those locations.
It is worth making clear that I do not believe that it is never possible to auditorily experience a sound as traveling. So, for instance, a sound might seem to travel if the train producing it travels. A sound might seem to travel toward you if the vehicle making it does. My claim is that sounds do not ordinarily seem to travel relative to or independent from their sources. Thus, a stationary source does not ordinarily give rise to a sound that seems to travel.
I will not here address the latter set of questions, concerning how we associate sounds with sources. I treat these issues in O’Callaghan (2007, 2008a). Location may be an important component to an account of how sounds are associated with sources. But, the auditory system is functionally segregated into “what” and “where” pathways analogous to those of vision (see, e.g., Kubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001), so it is reasonable to suppose that locational and identificatory processes comprise distinct if complementary roles when it comes to associating sounds with sources. My concern here is with the contribution of processes and information concerning the locations of sounds and sources, and not with an exhaustive explanation of that which grounds recognition and identification.
One might, of course, hear white noise or other aperiodic sounds that lack determinate pitch. Such sounds nonetheless have loudness and distinctive timbre.
One might attempt to press into service the distinction between the “what” and “where” auditory pathways in defense of the initial suggestion. Suppose the “what” system identifies the sound and its source on the basis of audible qualities stripped of locational significance. A consciously accessible auditory representation of the audible source might then simply be ascribed a location without adverting to the representation of a located sound. But, in what does the consciously accessible representation of an audible sound source as at a location amount to if it does not include a bound collection of audible qualities as at that location? One might escape the dilemma at the considerable expense of denying either that we ever hear sounds or that we hear things by hearing their sounds, so that one might hear a thing without hearing a sound. But that is not the suggestion we are considering, and it is sufficiently revisionary as to demand independent motivation and evaluation. I am comfortable to set it aside.
To be clear, I am not denying that sounds themselves are, metaphysically, some variety of object or event. In fact, I, like Casati and Dokic (2005), believe sounds are distally located events (see O’Callaghan 2007; 2009). What I mean is that awareness of objects and events that are not themselves sounds, such as ordinary bells and accidents, depends upon one’s awareness of a sound.
In fact, Strawson agrees with part of this. Strawson says that assigning location on the basis of audition is “sufficiently explained by the existence of correlations between the variations of which sound is intrinsically capable and other non-auditory features of our sense-experience” (p. 66). But Strawson does not think this is a matter of inference or facts accessible to the subject, as O’Shaughnessy seems to think. Strawson says, “I do not mean that we first note these correlations and then make inductive inferences on the basis of such observation; nor even that we could on reflection give them as reasons for the assignments of distance and direction that we in fact make on the strength of hearing alone” (p. 66).
Still, Strawson claims that “the de facto existence of such correlations is a necessary condition of our assigning distances and directions on the strength of hearing alone,” (p. 66) and so distinguishes hearing from vision. Evans (1982) also rejects the inference view. He says, “When we hear a sound as coming from a certain direction, we do not have to think or calculate which way to turn our heads (say) in order to look for the source of the sound” (p. 155). But he does hold that we might “envisage an organism which can be conditioned to respond differentially to those different values of the proximal stimulus which code the direction of sound, for instance by pressing a button” (pp. 154–5). Auditory spatial content requires using such correlations to direct spatial behavior. Nudds (2001, p. 226, note 3) suggests his arguments are compatible with such a view. To the extent that these accounts require extracting locational information from non-spatial audible qualities of sounds whose changes correspond to changes in location, my arguments against O’Shaughnessy apply. My blindsight argument, below in the text, does not.
I have been speaking as if we do have auditory access to ordinary things and events, which, according to Strawson, requires the perception of space (which is required to ground the conception of existence unperceived necessary for experiencing objective particulars). Strawson correctly points out that auditory awareness of ordinary things and events is mediated by one’s awareness of a sound. Whatever else we hear, such as cars and collisions, we hear it by way of hearing a sound.
One might suggest that this is because, though they can be experienced through visual or tactile-kinaesthetic means, neither light nor heat has intrinsic spatial characteristics. This, as in the case of audible qualities such as pitch, is implausible if light and heat, for example, are metaphysically dependent upon physical attributes such as energy and frequency, since such physical attributes arguably are intrinsically spatial.
This can be seen as a difference in quantifier scope when characterizing the experiences. In particular, it is a matter of whether the proposition that encodes the content of the experience includes the negative existential or whether the negated existential has widest scope in a proposition describing the experience.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Barbara Shinn-Cunningham for several enjoyable conversations about spatial audition and the auditory experience of space. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for extensive and extremely useful comments.
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O’Callaghan, C. Perceiving the Locations of Sounds. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 123–140 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-009-0001-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-009-0001-8