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Recorded Sounds and Auditory Media

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Pasnau 1999, Kulvicki 2008, Leddington 2014, 2018

  2. Casati and Dokic 1994, 2010, O’Callaghan 2007

  3. Nudds 2010

  4. Sounds can travel in space (i.e. ambulance) but contrarily to some medial theories they do not always travel.

  5. The goal of this paper is not to defend a distal theory of sounds against the medial approach. As asserted above, I will presuppose that the distal approach to sound is correct and explore its consequences for a theory of recorded sounds. It is interesting, however, to note that medial theories of sounds, by identifying sounds with sound waves, cannot theoretically distinguish between hearing a sound directly and hearing a recorded sound. In both cases, what the listener is hearing are sound waves reaching his or her ears.

  6. Elemans et al. (2015)

  7. See Casati 2012

  8. For some nice examples of binaural recordings, see https://binauralenthusiast.com/examples/.

  9. Surprisingly, binaural recording is not a recent invention. In fact, in 1881, Clément Adler demonstrated a transmission system that allowed listeners to enjoy the opera binaurally by holding one receiver against each ear. This broadcasting system was later used in several European cities for transmitting opera performances and plays.

  10. To take only a few examples: microscopes make germs appear bigger, telescopes make planets seem closer, mirrors make hands appear reversed, etc.

  11. For similarities between photography and recorded sounds, see §6.

  12. An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction.

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Correspondence to Vivian Mizrahi.

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Mizrahi, V. Recorded Sounds and Auditory Media. Philosophia 48, 1551–1567 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00168-8

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