Search

The debate over the metaphysics of sounds is about the nature of what we immediately auditorily perceive. There are good reasons to identify a sound with some kind of event. But what kind of event? I articulate and defend the broad event view of sounds, on which a sound is identified with a broad event that produces and shapes an acoustic wave. I show that other views that identify a sound with some kind of event face serious problems. In particular, Casati and Dokic’s (La philosophie du son, Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1994) monadic event view fails to capture the full range of sounds, while O’Callaghan’s (Sounds: a philosophical theory, Oxford University Press, 2007; in: Nudds, O’Callaghan (eds) Sounds and perception: new philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, 2009; Oxford Stud Metaphys 5:247–270, 2010) relational event view identifies sounds with too narrow of an event, leading to problems capturing important differences between sounds and putting the perceiver at an unnecessary remove from the kind of broad events she typically cares about. The broad event view avoids these pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that chimericity is a property that we typically experience when listening to multi-instrumental music. It is the property of hearing as a unified whole a melody or a harmony that does not belong to any single sound source but instead consists of the assembling of melodic or harmonic fragments coming from different sources. Chimericity is not reducible to the low-level audible properties of pitch and loudness; it is cognized at the perceptual level thanks to the auditory mechanism of primitive grouping. My aim is to show that chimericity is a perceptual property, one that we can genuinely hear. In developing this view, I engage with the debate within the philosophy of sense perception between rich vs thin views of the content of perceptual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will argue that the gender properties expressed by human voices are part of auditory phenomenology. I will support this claim by investigating auditory adaptational effects on such properties and contrasting auditory experiences, before and after the adaptational effects take place. In light of this investigation, I will conclude that auditory experience is not limited to low-level properties. Perception appears to be much more informative about the auditory landscape than is commonly thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]