Sounding objects | Les objets sonores Nicolas Bullot, Roberto Casati, Jérôme Dokic, Maurizio Giri Institut Nicod (Paris) CNRS | EHESS | ENS ArtCognition Studio Colloque ‘Design sonore 2004’ http://www.design-sonore.org (IRCAM, SFA) (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 13-15 October 2004) Contents - Taxonomy of philosophical theories of Sound: proximal theories; medial theories; distal theories. - A distal theory: The Located Event Theory (LET) of sound – Understanding sound and the cognition of sounding objects; ontology of sound according to the LET; epistemology of the perception of sound and sounding objects; auditory images according to the LET; conceptual revisions entailed by distal theories and the LET; replies to objections. Philosophical Theories of Sound - Why are we proposing a ‘philosophical’ theory of sound? Usefulness of conceptual analysis – vs. definition; vs. theoretical characterization. - A fruitful way to organize issues and taxonomies about the nature of sound deals with how theories conceive of the spatial properties of sounds. Proximal theories - According to proximal theories, sounds are sensations or qualitative aspects of auditory perception. From the point of view of proximal theories, sounds are conceived of as internal events, as mental episodes, or proximal stimulations. This may be the mainstream view in psychology. It emphasizes the high correlation between felt properties of sounds and properties of perceptual system. Medial theories - According to medial theories, sounds are conceived of as being located between the sounding objects and the hearer. This may be the mainstream view in acoustics: sounds are held to be sound waves. It has a high explanatory power due to the high correlation of physical quantities and felt qualities. However, the correlation is poor with felt location of sound. Distal theories - One should consider another candidate for the determination of the nature of sounds, namely distal properties, processes or events in the medium inside (or at the surface of) sounding physical objects, or in the stuff of the sounding object. Distal views claim they are superior to their non-distal competitors in virtue of their better adherence to the spatial structure of auditory content. In point of fact, we do hear sounds both as externalized (hence auditory content is at odds with proximal views) and as distally located (hence auditory content is at odds with medial views). - Sounds are where you hear them. A possible misreading of the phenomenological constraint: “we want an account of sounds that is completely true to the phenomenology” – this is a much too strong reading. A weaker construal is this: auditory perception has the power to represent sounds; it has the power to represent motion; it has the power to represent sounds in motion; hence it should be able to represent sounds as moving individuals. But this is not possible according to medial theories (since sound waves are not moving individuals). Thus, medial theories are not convincing from the phenomenological viewpoint – and hence move to distal theories.