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Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events

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Abstract

Musicians and theorists such as the radiophonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, view the products of new audio technologies as devices whereby the experience of sound can be displaced from its causal origins and achieve new musical or poetic resonances. Accordingly, the listening experience associated with sonic art within this perspective is ‘acousmatic’; the process of sound generation playing no role in the description or understanding of the experience as such. In this paper I shall articulate and defend a position according to which an adequate phenomenology of auditory experience must refer to mechanisms of sound generation. This position is shown to follow from a phenomenology of sounds as located events and a physicalist account of auditory properties as features of the temporal development of such events.

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Notes

  1. Timbre is what differentiates—say—a concert A played for a certain time interval on a piano and the same note played on a clarinet or oboe. Similarly, much inharmonic or untuned sound—noise—is timbrally differentiated in spite of lacking definable pitch or rhythmic characteristics.

  2. ‘Pierre Schaeffer and the Significance of Radiophonic Art’.

  3. Bullot et al. (2004).

  4. In fact Casati and Dokic argue that since events and processes are temporally extended we cannot localize an event at a point where only one of its phases had occurred. However different temporal phases of a vibratory event occur at distinct locations, which is what reports regarding the ‘movement’ of sounds advert to. Here they follow Fred Dretske’s argument against the claim that events can move (Casati and Dokic 2005a; Dretske 1967).

  5. la philosophie du son, Chapter 3.

  6. Casati and Dokic (2005a). See O’Callaghan(2004). See also Casati and Dokic (2005b).

  7. La philosophie du son, p. 46. See Sections 3 and 5 below.

  8. Casey O’Callaghan, ‘Pitch’, pp. 6–7; Shepard (2001).

  9. ‘Pitch’, p. 7.

  10. ‘Pitch’, pp. 9–10; La philosophie du son, chapter 11.

  11. This problem applies to phenomenal properties in other sense modalities of course. See Shoemaker (1994).

  12. McGinn (1996). See below.

  13. See ‘Pitch’, pp. 14–21.

  14. It is not clear that it can also accommodate musical pitch relations as opposed to the psychometric pitch relations employed in his statement of the pitch/frequency relation.

  15. Risset (1966), cited in Dodge and Jerse (1997).

  16. John Chowning, ‘Perceptual Fusion and Auditory Perspective’, cited in Music, Cognition and Computerised Sound, pp. 264–267.

  17. La philosophie du son, pp. 173–4, [my trans.]. One could object, with Sidney Shoemaker, that a complex relation such as a disposition could still be represented perceptually as monadic. So the fact, if it is one, that vision is non-reflexive is hardly decisive here (Shoemaker 1994). Shoemaker’s objection is persuasive. Nonetheless, treating phenomenal character as relational in this way presents other difficulties. For example, what kind of relations fit the bill? Dispositions do not seem to, for reasons already mentioned above. It is difficult to reconcile the claim that phenomenal properties are causal relations with the assumption that the properties objects are represented as possessing in audition and vision appear to be there when nobody is around to have experiences with those contents produced in them. If phenomenal properties are indeed will o’ the wisps then it is unclear how they represent persistent and observer-independent properties in an organism’s environment. See Tye (2000).

  18. La philosophie du son, p.175.

  19. Casati and Dokic (2005a), pp. 175–176. The idea of existential dependence in supervenience theories is explicated towards the end of this section.

  20. The notion of supervenience is frequently used by non-reductive materialists to express the dependence of mental properties on physical properties without entailing their reducibility to the latter. Informally: M properties supervene on P properties if a thing’s P properties determine its M properties. If aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, if x is physically identical to y and x is beautiful, y must be beautiful. Supervenience accounts vary with the modal force of the entailments involved. ‘Natural’ or ‘nomological’ supervenience holds in worlds whose physical laws are like our own. ‘Metaphysical supervenience’, on the other hand, is often claimed to hold with logical or conceptual necessity (Section 5). See Kim (1984).

  21. Kim (1984), p. 177 [my trans.]. The theory is, in this respect, similar in its metaphysical underpinnings to the supervenience dispositional account of phenomenal qualities advanced by Colin McGinn. See ‘Another Look at Color’.

  22. La philosophie du son, p. 177 [my trans.].

  23. The suggestion that there are discrete ‘perceptual acts’ for events, objects, properties and other ontological categories is not self-contradictory or absurd.

  24. This should not be confused with the distinction between hearing a sound with a given auditory property (say, fast attack) and hearing that the sound has a fast attack (where the presence of a ‘that’ clause implies a perceptual judgment or the capacity to employ morphological concepts such as attack and decay). To perceive an event one must be able to perceive some features of its temporal development (if only that it begins or ceases). It does not follow that one will be able to form the correlative beliefs or wield the correlative concepts.

  25. Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition and Performance, pp. 115–135.

  26. ‘Another Look at Colour’, p. 545.

  27. For connectionist treatments of this topic see Timothy Van Gelder, ‘Wooden Iron, Husserlian Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science,’ in Naturalising Phenomenology, p. 260; Port et al. (1994).

  28. La philosophie du son, p. 179.

  29. ‘Another Look at Colour’, pp. 545–46.

  30. For a parallel discussion of cases of different colour acuity see Tye (2002).

  31. It might be objected that we can imagine a subject hearing a constant sound—a pure tone, say—without altering in pitch or timbre. However, this sound would have a characteristic timbre. In this case LETA entails that the subject would perceive the periodic behaviour constitutive of the sound even where the global character of these changes—their sinusoidal character—might never alter. The same point naturally applies to inharmonic, aperiodic sounds.

  32. And (as Casati and Dokic argue) it is only by being heard in objects that we can locate events in space.

  33. Though see Section 5 below.

  34. la philosophie du son, Chapter 4, pp. 49–50; ‘Sounding Objects’ p. 4.

  35. Matthew Nudds, ‘Experiencing the Production of Sounds’, European Journal of Philosophy 9:2, pp. 210–229.

  36. ‘Experiencing the Production of Sounds’, p, 217.

  37. La philosophie du son, Chapter 3.

  38. An equivalent point can, of course, be made about algorithmic processes implemented by living musicians, such as medieval isorhythms or Steve Reich’s phasing techniques.

  39. Expressive or linguistic properties are problematic, arguably, only if physicalism in the philosophy of mind generally is false. I would argue that most standard objections to physicalism in the theory of mind fail, but it is obviously beyond the scope of this paper to adjudicate on this topic.

  40. ‘Sounding Objects’.

  41. Roberto Casati, ‘Sounds’.

  42. La philosophie du son, Chapter 3.

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    David Roden

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Roden, D. Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 141–156 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-009-0002-7

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