Sounds: A Philosophical Theory

Finished · Philosophy

Summary

Chapter 2: Sounds are audible particulars or objects because they (1) bear traits of pitch, timber and loudness, (2) they can be recognized as distinct objects, both at a point in time and across time as well, (3) they have duration, persisting through time with their characteristics, and (4) they are resistant to change.

Moreover, sounds are distinct from the objects that generate them. One reason given for this is that an object can produce one sound, and then while that sound is being produced generate a distinct sound that either overlaps it or does not. When you hear an object make two sounds, you do not say the number of objects has changed, but that the object has produced two sounds.

Chapter 3: The location of sounds is at its source. Otherwise, the perception of sound as being located at its source is just an illusion. Perceptually, if sound was the wave that travels, we should hear them whizzing by us, but that is certainly not the case. In sum, sounds don't travel. Rather, they have effects that travel through a medium that help us understand and perceive the sound.

Chapter 4: Sounds do not occur in vacuums. O'Callaghan's primary argument for this is that a medium is what communicates certain qualities of the sound, the absence of a medium means that no qualities of the sound are present. If no qualities of a sound are present, then there is no sound. Importantly, you can't say that sound's potential qualities are those in a "standard medium" because the notion of standard in this sense is arbitrary. What makes atmospheric air pressure more standard than under water? This is different than the color quality of an object, in which daylight offers essentially the full spectrum of light, which reveals the most color quality of the object. In that sense the color of an object is standard when the full spectrum (and therefore most aspects of the color quality) are revealed. Sound is different because there is no medium in which a fuller quality is revealed; rather, mediums result in altering the quality. In sum, this chapter seems to argue that because there are no audible qualities of the sound present in a vacuum, the sound is not there.

Chapter 5: Sounds are events. More specifically, sounds are the disturbances in which an object that is vibrating interacts with a medium. The event of the disturbance of a medium is the sound. Moreover, complex sounds are just more complex events made up of many distinct sounds. Casey will spend the remainder of the book arguing that the event notion of sound is what enables them to nicely account for being able to distinguish individual sounds from another distinct sound. As long as a source remains constant and the spacial and temporal components of the sound are continuous (there is no distcontinuouty in time or space of the sound), this is a single distinct sound.

Chapter 6: Pitch, loudness, and timbre are attributes of sound events. The chapter deals longest with the idea of pitch, noting that pitch is dependent on wave frequency, but that items with different frequency components can have the same pitch. Ultimately because sound waves exhibit periodicity, they must possess the quality of pitch. Loudness is dealt with next, and the main argument for the theory proposed in the book of sound as an event in which an object disturbs the surrounding medium is that it better accounts for the constancy of loudness compared to the wave theory of sounds. Finally, timbre, though not possessing a stable invariant cue, is based on the spectral components of a sound. Notably, the timbre of a sound emanating from a source is recognizable as coming from that source across time and contexts. This constancy of timbre across waves of different contexts is not well explained by a wave theory of sound.