# Live Controversies in the Philosophy of Spatial Hearing: A Research-Orientation Review ## Preface What follows is an opinionated map of the live disputes in the philosophy of spatial hearing, pitched at someone already working in the area. The aim is not to rehearse the standard taxonomy (proximal/medial/distal/aspatial; sounds-as-events versus sounds-as-properties versus sounds-as-waves) for its own sake, but to identify where the battle lines currently run, which arguments are doing real work, and where the dialectic is converging, diverging, or stalled. Classical figures (Strawson, Berkeley, Locke, O'Shaughnessy, Evans) appear only insofar as the contemporary controversies cannot be stated without them. Multimodal questions are bracketed except where they constitutively shape a controversy about auditory spatial content itself. The period under examination is roughly 2015–2026, with particular attention to publications since 2020. The following are, on my reading, the eight live controversies in the area, plus a final section on recent collateral work. They are not independent: the location debate, the field debate, the silence debate and the source-versus-sound debate are deeply entangled, and one of the more interesting recent developments is the way in which positions taken in one debate now constrain options in the others. --- ## 1. The Locational Content Controversy: Direction, Distance, or Neither? **The question.** What spatial content does auditory experience have? Three live answers compete: (a) sounds (or their bearers) are presented as fully located in egocentric space, with both direction and distance; (b) sounds are presented as merely directional, with distance information being inferred or non-perceptual; (c) sounds are not presented as located at all — auditory experience is, at the relevant level of abstraction, aspatial, and any apparent locational phenomenology is to be re-described as awareness of the location of the *source*, or as the upshot of cross-modal contributions, or as cognitive judgement. **Main positions and defenders.** The full-locational view is most clearly defended by O'Callaghan (*Sounds: A Philosophical Theory*, 2007; 'Perceiving the Locations of Sounds', *RoPP* 2010; *Beyond Vision*, 2017), and by Casati and Dokic from their 1994 *La philosophie du son* through to their joint Stanford Encyclopedia entries with Di Bona (most recently the Fall 2025 edition). The view's signature commitment is that auditory experience presents sounds as located at or near their source events — a commitment driven by the constraint that perception is not systematically illusory. The proximal view, which holds that sounds are heard at the ears or 'in the head', is defended classically by O'Shaughnessy (*Consciousness and the World*, 2000; 'The Location of Sounds', in Nudds and O'Callaghan 2009) and partly by Maclachlan (1989); it survives in the contemporary literature mostly as a foil. The aspatial view's central contemporary articulation is Nudds, 'Sounds and Space' (in Nudds and O'Callaghan, *Sounds and Perception*, OUP 2009) and 'Audition' (in *Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception*, 2015). Nudds's distinctive thesis is that sounds are abstract individuals — frequency-component patterns instantiated by waves — and that we *do not hear them as located at all*. Apparent spatial phenomenology is explained by reference to the spatial properties of *sources*, not sounds: the auditory system's task is to group frequency components and attribute them to a common source, a process that, on Nudds's account, is not intrinsically spatial in its representational content concerning sounds themselves. The most consequential recent intervention is Douglas Wadle's 'Restricted Auditory Aspatialism' (*BJPS* 76(1), 2025: 173–207). Wadle revives a Strawsonian distinction between *purely auditory* and ordinary auditory experience, but motivates it on grounds that are quite different from Strawson's descriptive metaphysics. Drawing on the receptivity profile of the basilar membrane and on the lack of any uncontested individuation of the senses, Wadle argues that there is a minimal but recognisable notion of audition for which the phenomenal objection to aspatialism — viz., that we manifestly experience sounds as out there, off in some direction, at some distance — fails to apply. The strategy is dialectical: if any such minimal notion is defensible, then the metaphysical conclusions distal theorists draw from the phenomenal objection (sounds are events, or properties of sources, rather than waves or sensations) are blocked, since the objection no longer obviously targets *audition* as such. Whether the phenomenology cited by spatialists is properly assigned to audition rather than to a multisensory or premodal capacity becomes a genuinely open question. A different challenge to full locational content comes from Kalderon's *Sympathy in Perception* (CUP 2017), Chapter 3, which defends a wave-theoretic view on which sounds are events of patterned medium-disturbance propagating in every direction. Kalderon's *emanative* phenomenology — sounds as suffusing the medium and *coming from* their sources — is meant to do justice to phenomenology while preserving the wave view. The view is typically classed as medial. The forced choice it presents to the spatialist is sharp: if Kalderon is right that sound phenomenology is emanative rather than punctate-distal, then the full-locational reading attributes to audition a precision and a spatial determinacy it does not in fact possess. Di Bona's commentary on this question (in 'Why Space Matters to an Understanding of Sound', in Cheng, Deroy and Spence, *Spatial Senses*, Routledge 2019) puts the rejoinder pointedly: how, if Kalderon's view is right, do we phenomenologically distinguish hearing a sound at a location from hearing its source at a location? **Where the debate stands.** Three observations on the current state of play. First, the simple full/directional/aspatial trichotomy now looks too coarse: Wadle's restricted aspatialism, Kalderon's emanative medialism and Nudds's source-mediated aspatialism all carve up the dialectical space differently. Second, the empirical literature on auditory distance perception (the loudness-constancy work descending from Zahorik and Wightman 2001; the reverberation-based estimation of source power) is doing real philosophical work, and the question of how phenomenologically determinate auditory distance content is — whether it is properly perceptual or partly cognitive — is being pressed harder than it was a decade ago. Third, the metaphysical leverage that O'Callaghan extracted from the phenomenal objection in 2007 is no longer secure: Wadle, Kwok and Kalderon all show, in different ways, that the inference from 'we hear sounds at their sources' to 'sounds are at their sources' depends on contestable assignments of phenomenology to audition. --- ## 2. The Auditory Field Controversy: Is There One, and What Would It Have to Be Like? **The question.** Does auditory experience instantiate a perceptual *field* — a spatially structured array within which audible items are presented to the subject — analogous (or partly analogous) to the visual field? If so, what structural features must such a field have: boundedness, edges, occlusion, regions, gaps, surrounding character? **Main positions and defenders.** The sceptical tradition runs through Strawson (*Individuals*, 1959), O'Shaughnessy ('The Location of Sounds', 2009; *Consciousness and the World*, 2000), Tye (*Ten Problems of Consciousness*, 1995; *Consciousness Revisited*, 2009), Martin ('Sight and Touch', in Crane (ed.) *The Contents of Experience*, 1992), and Macpherson. The shared sceptical thought is that audition lacks the requisite invariant spatial structure: there is no auditory analogue of the bounded conical field of view, no auditory occlusion in the visual sense, no clear notion of an auditory 'region of space' within which audibles are seen as arrayed. The principal recent positive defence is Keith Wilson, 'The Auditory Field: The Spatial Character of Auditory Experience' (*Ergo* 9(40), 2023: 1080–1106). Wilson distinguishes two boundedness conditions, drawn out of Richardson's discussion of the visual field: a *Boundedness₁* condition (the field is experienced as bounded by a region in which external objects are presented via that modality) and a *Boundedness₂* condition (the field is bounded by the experienced locations of external objects). He argues that audition meets both, although in distinctive ways: the auditory horizon — the most distant region containing audibly presented sources — is the auditory analogue of the visual actual field of view (*Boundedness₂*); and the omnidirectional, surrounding character of the auditory field, far from undermining its existence, just shows that auditory boundaries are realised differently from visual ones (the relevant 'edge' is the silent region beyond what is currently sounded, not a wrap-around limit of sensory capacity). Wilson also presses the point that auditory occlusion is real, that masking is the auditory analogue of brightness-occlusion, and that the apparent darkness/silence asymmetry has been overstated. **Live arguments.** The debate now turns on three sub-questions. (i) *Surroundingness*: critics in the Strawson–Martin tradition treat the surrounding character of audition as a mark against field-likeness; Wilson treats it as a feature, not a bug. The debate hinges on whether 'fields' are essentially conical/perspectival or whether wrap-around fields are admissible. (ii) *Empty regions*: Nudds (2009) denies, following an example of Martin's, that audition presents empty regions of space, while Wilson and Skrzypulec (2022) argue it does. The question is whether attending to a silent location between two sounding sources is awareness of an *acoustically empty region*, or a non-perceptual judgement. (iii) *Tonotopy versus retinotopy*: it has sometimes been suggested (Wilson notes the objection without endorsing it) that the tonotopic, frequency-based organisation of primary auditory cortex precludes a spatial field. Wilson argues this conflates vehicle and content; the objection is largely a non-starter. **Where the debate stands.** Wilson's paper has reset the terrain: the question is no longer whether to be sceptical wholesale about an auditory field, but what *kind* of field, with what structural features, audition supports. The Mac Cumhaill literature on visual and tactual immersion ('The Tactual Ground, Immersion and "the Space Between"', *Southern Journal of Philosophy* 2017; 'Perceiving Immaterial Paths', *PPR* 2015) offers structural resources that have not yet been fully imported into the auditory case, and Skrzypulec's adjacent work on tactile fields ('Is There a Tactile Field?', *Philosophical Psychology* 35(3), 2022) and on perceptual boundaries ('Space and Perceptual Boundaries', *Philosophical Studies* 181(6), 2024) is plainly relevant. Tony Cheng's 'Spatial Representations in Sensory Modalities' (*Mind and Language* 37(3), 2022) has helped to refocus the question around the interplay of perspectival variation and constancy, and the empirical literature on egocentric versus allocentric coding in auditory cortex is gradually being absorbed. --- ## 3. The Sound Metaphysics / Location Debate, So Far As It Bears on Spatial Hearing The metaphysical question 'where are sounds?' is normally classified by the proximal/medial/distal/aspatial taxonomy, but the live controversy concerns which of these views can do justice to spatial-hearing phenomena. The state of play, restricted to issues of spatial relevance: **Distal event views.** Casati and Dokic (1994; 'Some Varieties of Spatial Hearing', in Nudds and O'Callaghan 2009) and O'Callaghan (2007, 2009, 2010) treat sounds as located events at or near their sources. The sounds-as-source-events view was strengthened by Casati, Di Bona and Dokic, 'The Ockhamization of the Event Sources of Sound' (*Analysis* 73(3), 2013: 462–6), which uses parsimony to recommend identifying sounds with their event sources rather than treating them as distinct sourced events. The argument has been pressed back against by Leddington (see below). **Distal property views.** Pasnau ('What Is Sound?' *Philosophical Quarterly* 49, 1999), Kulvicki ('The Nature of Noise', *Philosophers' Imprint* 8, 2008; 'Sound Stimulants', in Stokes, Biggs and Matthen (eds), *Perception and Its Modalities*, 2014). On these views, sounds are properties of vibrating objects — either categorical or dispositional. Roberts ('Turning up the Volume on the Property View of Sound', *Inquiry* 60(4), 2017) defends the view by reckoning with disanalogies between sounds and colours. **Distal event-property views.** A genuinely new position has emerged here. Leddington's 'Sounds Fully Simplified' (*Analysis* 79(4), 2019: 621–9) replied to the 2013 Casati/Di Bona/Dokic Ockhamisation argument by arguing that the considerations they marshal in fact support a Lockean property view treating sounds as audible properties of *event sources* rather than as identical to those events. This was developed at length in Leddington's 'The Event-Property View of Sounds' (*Inquiry* 68(10), 2025: 3849–80; available online from October 2024). Sounds are temporally extended properties instantiated by source events; the view is offered as the only property view that can absorb the insights of recent particularist literature on audition while doing justice to the role of sources. The view has met immediate critical engagement: Nick Young, 'Sounds as Properties' (*Thought* 10(2), 2021: 109–17), argues that Leddington's case for events-as-bearers (rather than objects-as-bearers) is at best ambiguous and that there are good reasons to want both objects and events among the things we hear; Young's alternative is that sounds are *temporally extended properties of objects*. The Leddington/Young exchange is at the heart of the current property-view literature, and it has direct spatial-hearing consequences: where the sound is depends on where its bearer is, and a property view of either stripe automatically collapses the gap between source location and sound location that exercises medial theorists. **Wave / medial views.** Kalderon, *Sympathy in Perception* 2017, ch. 3; Nudds (2009, 2010); Sorensen, *Seeing Dark Things* 2008, ch. 14; Meadows; Calvin Kwok, *Hearing Waves: A Philosophy of Sound and Auditory Perception* (PhD thesis, Hong Kong, 2020), and most consequentially Kwok's 'Do We Hear Compression Waves?' (*Inquiry* 67(9), 2024: 3140–68). The state of the wave view's defence has changed materially with Kwok's contribution, which addresses the spatial misrepresentation objection (SMO) head-on. The SMO is the standard objection to wave theory: if sounds are propagating compression waves, ordinary auditory experience, which presents sounds at stable distal locations, is massively illusory. Kwok argues that the SMO rests on a mischaracterisation of auditory phenomenology: properly understood, the wave view is not committed to our hearing sounds *as propagating*. He develops a metaphysics of compression waves and an account of auditory perception on which both source and wave can be represented in the same experience. Whatever one makes of this, it removes what had been the main reason for distal theorists to dismiss the wave view out of hand. **Aspatial views.** Nudds (2009); Wadle (2025). Already discussed under §1. **Live spatial-hearing arguments.** *The echo argument.* O'Callaghan ('Echoes', *Monist* 90(3), 2007: 403–14; *Sounds*, ch. 8–9) argued that echoes are best handled by treating them as the same sound encountered later, supporting his disturbance-event view. Gregory Fowler's 'Against the Primary Sound Account of Echoes' (*Analysis* 73(3), 2013: 466–73) attacks PSAE and uses the failure of PSAE to put pressure on distal theories generally. Jeff Hawley has extended Fowler's argument with new echo cases drawn from acoustical practice ('Doing a Double Take: (Further) Against the Primary Sound Account of Echoes', philarchive). The status of distal theories' response to the echo argument remains unsettled; Leddington's event-property view is meant to handle echoes more elegantly than O'Callaghan's view. *The constancy problem (loudness/distance).* Loudness constancy across distance — a sound source heard as having a roughly constant loudness whether near or far, despite enormous changes in proximal acoustic intensity — was given empirical foundation by Zahorik and Wightman ('Loudness Constancy with Varying Sound Source Distance', *Nature Neuroscience* 4, 2001), who argued that the auditory system uses the reverberant-to-direct-energy ratio rather than absolute distance estimates. The philosophical consequences are still being worked through. If loudness is a property of *sources* tracked via reverberation, this counts in favour of source-locational views; but it equally undermines the assumption that the audible quality of sound is heard at the location of the wave-front. The constancy problem has become a focal site for arguing that what is heard as located is the source, not the sound. *The distal-volume argument.* Both the auditory representation of room volume via reverberation (see §4) and the experience of sound sources at varying distances put pressure on medial views, since the medial view must explain why we don't hear sounds in the medium *between* us and the source (Kwok answers; Nudds also has a story). *The vacuum argument.* Berkeley's classical bell-in-a-vacuum argument — that no sound is produced when a bell is struck in a vacuum — was used by Pasnau against the property view. O'Callaghan's *Sounds*, ch. 4, contains a sustained discussion. The argument continues to constrain views: those who hold that sounds require a medium (medial event theorists, wave theorists, relational distal theorists like O'Callaghan) accept the vacuum data; pure property theorists must hold that bells silently produce sounds in vacua, or else qualify their dispositional analysis appropriately. *The Ockhamisation argument.* Casati, Di Bona and Dokic (2013): if sounds are proper parts of their event sources, then sounds = event sources by Ockham's razor. Leddington (2019, 2025) inverts the inference to support an event-property view. The dispute is now methodological as much as metaphysical: whether parsimony favours identifying sounds with sources or treating sounds as audible properties of those sources turns on what theoretical roles sounds need to play. --- ## 4. The Empty Space / Reverberation Controversy **The question.** When sounds reverberate in an enclosure, do we *hear empty space*? Or is reverberation a property of sounds, and the spatial information it conveys non-perceptually inferred? **Main positions and defenders.** The positive view is Nick Young, 'Hearing Spaces' (*AJP* 95(2), 2017: 242–55), arguing that reverberation experiences cannot be reduced to hearing distinct sounds, hearing echoes or hearing properties of a sound; that any account that denies hearing empty space owes us a story about what perceptually grounds our beliefs about room volume; and that, by elimination, the volume of the surrounding space is auditorily represented. The view is in dialogue with Mac Cumhaill's 'Perceiving Immaterial Paths' (*PPR* 90(3), 2015: 687–715), which defends an analogous claim for vision (we see, rather than infer, the empty paths through which moving objects can pass), and with Richardson's earlier work on visual perception of empty space. The sceptical position is Nudds (2009), who explicitly denies that empty space can be heard. The challenge for the sceptic is to account, in a non-perceptual register, for the rapid and reliable cathedral-versus-cupboard discriminations we make on the basis of reverberation alone. Wilson (2023) takes Young's claim further: the space within which sounds are presented as occurring is *itself* part of the auditory field, and reverberation is one of the principal ways its boundaries are made perceptually accessible. Wilson explicitly endorses Young's general direction while remaining cautious about the full distal-volume claim. **Live questions.** Is reverberation *a property of sounds* (so we hear it in hearing them) or *a property of acoustic environments* (so we hear it as a property of the surrounding space)? If the former, the property view of sound gets a new resource; if the latter, the auditory field acquires structural depth that the sceptical tradition denied it. There is an underexplored intermediate position, suggested in passing by Leddington's event-property framework, on which reverberation is a property of the *source event in its environmental embedding* — neither purely a property of the sound nor purely a property of the room. The empirical literature on neural separation of source and reverberant-space representations (the Traer/McDermott line, and the MEG signature of source/space separation reported in *eNeuro* 2017) is starting to constrain the philosophical options, though the work remains under-utilised in the philosophical debate. --- ## 5. The Silence Controversy, Insofar as it Bears on Spatial Hearing Silence has been a focal site of dispute since Sorensen's 'Hearing Silence: The Perception and Introspection of Absences' (in Nudds and O'Callaghan 2009) and Phillips's 'Hearing and Hallucinating Silence' (in Macpherson and Platchias (eds), *Hallucination*, MIT 2013). The straightforwardly spatial intervention is Skrzypulec, 'Silence Perception and Spatial Content' (*AJP* 100(3), 2022: 524–38), which argues that experiences of silence have *egocentric spatial content*: silence is not merely an absence of auditory experience but a positive perceptual presentation of empty spatial directions ('to the left', 'behind'). The argument turns on parallels between visual experiences of darkness (which are not mere absences of vision) and auditory experiences of silence, and draws on psychological work on auditory attention to support phenomenal status. Adjacent contributions: Meadows, 'Experiencing Silence' (*CJP* 50(2), 2020: 238–50), criticising Phillips and Soteriou and offering an alternative; Gow, 'Empty Space, Silence, and Absence' (*CJP* 51(7), 2021: 496–507), arguing that experiences of empty space and silence do not qualify as absence experiences and so cannot serve as paradigms for the perceptual view of absence; Šterbáková, 'Can We Hear Silence?' (*Philosophia* 48(1), 2020). The empirical landmark is Goh, Phillips and Firestone, 'The Perception of Silence' (*PNAS* 120(29), 2023: e2301463120), which used three silence-substituted illusions (one-silence-is-more, silence-based warping, oddball-silence) to show that auditory processing treats moments of silence the way it treats sounds. The paper's authors take this as evidence that silence is genuinely perceived, not merely inferred — broadly aligning with Phillips's earlier philosophical position. **Where the debate stands on the *spatial* aspect.** Skrzypulec's claim is the live one: that silence has not just temporal but *egocentric spatial* content. It is contested in two ways. First, by those (Gow, in some moods Meadows) who deny that silence experiences are perceptual at all; if the cognitive view is right, the spatial-content question doesn't get traction. Second, by those who accept that silence is perceptually experienced but doubt that it has fine-grained directional content of the sort Skrzypulec posits. The Goh/Phillips/Firestone results provide some empirical traction for the perceptual view but do not directly bear on the directional-content claim. Wilson (2023) endorses something close to Skrzypulec's position — that silent regions are part of the auditory field — and links it explicitly to the auditory field debate. The natural next move is to test the directional-silence claim experimentally; this has not yet, to my knowledge, been done. --- ## 6. Egocentric Frames and the Subject **The question.** Auditory spatial content is paradigmatically egocentric — sounds are heard as off to *my* left or above *my* head. But what does this egocentric structure actually require? Does it require that the perceiving subject is *represented* in auditory experience, and if so, how? As a point, as a complex bodily structure, as the head, as the ears? **Main positions.** The most developed view is Skrzypulec's 'Egocentric Content and the Complex Subject' (*Erkenntnis*, online 2024). The argument is given for vision but is intended to generalise to other modalities: representing directional qualities like 'being to the left' is best understood as representing objects *in relation to parts of a complex bodily structure*, rather than as ascribing intrinsic directional properties to objects. The claim is methodological as well as substantive: only the bodily-relational reading explains the role of directional content in action selection. For audition, the view bears directly on the role of the head in constituting auditory spatial content: the ears, the pinnae, head movements, and the body are all candidates for parts of the represented subject. This connects with Skrzypulec's 'Silence Perception and Spatial Content' (2022): if silence has egocentric spatial content, then the subject-element to which silent directions are referred has to be specified. **Live questions.** Is auditory egocentric frame fixed (head-centred) or does it shift with eye gaze and body orientation? The empirical literature on auditory-spatial realignment with eye position (the *Journal of Neuroscience* 2007 line) and on egocentric/allocentric coexistence in auditory cortex (the *PLoS Biology* 2017 ferret work) provides constraints. Philosophically, the question is whether auditory space is *necessarily* egocentric (it is hard to see what it would be for a sound to be heard at an allocentric location simpliciter, without any egocentric anchoring) or whether allocentric coding underwrites a thin allocentric layer of auditory content. Cheng's 2022 *Mind and Language* paper provides the relevant framework: the relation between perspectival variation (egocentric) and spatial constancy (allocentric or objective) is the live question, and audition is one of the test cases. There is no consensus. --- ## 7. The Strawson–Evans Question: Where Does It Stand? **The question.** Strawson's 1959 thought-experiment in *Individuals* asked whether a creature with only auditory experience could possess spatial concepts. His answer was: only via the master-sound device — a continuously varying tone whose pitch correlates with 'position', so that an analogue of space can be reconstructed within an intrinsically non-spatial modality. Evans, in 'Things Without the Mind' (in van Straaten (ed.), *Philosophical Subjects*, 1980), endorsed a version of the verificationist gloss: the truth of a claim about the location of a sound consists in counterfactuals about what would be heard from various positions. **Where the debate stands.** Three observations. First, the empirical case against Strawson — that audition *is* in fact intrinsically spatial in a way Strawson's thought-experiment occludes — is now widely accepted (see O'Callaghan 2010, the SEP entry on auditory perception, the empirical literature on spatial hearing). Second, Wadle's 2025 paper revives the Strawsonian project as a *philosophical* exercise distinct from any empirical claim about ordinary audition: the question is whether there is a notion of *purely* auditory experience, suitably distinguished from cross-modal or premodal contributions, for which Strawson's aspatialism remains correct. Wadle thinks yes; this is currently the most rigorous reconstruction of Strawson's position in the recent literature. Third, on the master-sound device specifically, recent work has been mostly historical or pedagogical (the University of Liverpool's 'Life without Space' project on Stapledon and Strawson) rather than systematic. Anil Gomes's recent papers — 'Unity, Objectivity, and the Passivity of Experience' (*European Journal of Philosophy*, 2017) and 'Unity and Objectivity in Strawson and Cassam' (*Analytic Philosophy* 62(1), 2021: 84–96) — engage with the Strawsonian framework in *Bounds of Sense* mode rather than the auditory-aspatialism mode of *Individuals* ch. 2. They are relevant background for anyone wanting to reopen the original Strawson–Evans question, but they do not themselves take a stand on auditory spatial content. The broader verdict is that, twenty years on, the Strawson–Evans question has been transformed rather than settled: the form in which it remains live is Wadle's restricted-aspatialism question, which is recognisably descended from Strawson but argued on quite different grounds. --- ## 8. Source Location vs Sound Location This may be the deepest of the live controversies, in part because it cuts across each of the others. **The question.** Even granting that audition is spatial, *what* is heard as located? The location of the sound, the location of the source, or both? And: do we hear sources directly (Heideggerian view) or only via their sounds (Berkeleian view)? **Main positions.** The Berkeleian view — that sounds are the immediate objects of hearing and that sources are heard, if at all, only mediately — is endorsed by O'Callaghan (2007, 2008, 2009), Sorensen (2009), Tye (2009), and Nudds (2010, 2018). The Heideggerian view — that sources are heard *directly*, in hearing the sounds they make, just as objects are seen directly in seeing their colours — is defended in Leddington's 'What We Hear' (in Brown (ed.), *Consciousness Inside and Out*, Springer 2014: 339ff.), with critical commentary by Nudds and O'Callaghan in the same volume; subsequently in Leddington 2019 and 2025; and in Casati, Di Bona and Dokic 2013. Kalderon (2017) sits awkwardly here: he is a wave theorist who treats sources as objects of perception in a different sense, via the emanative phenomenology. **Live arguments.** *The Heideggerian's positive case (Leddington).* Phenomenology presents sounds as bound to their sources (Phenomenological Binding); presents sound sources as available for primitive demonstrative reference (Phenomenological Intimacy); and so does not present sounds as independent of their sources (Phenomenological Independence is false). *The Young rejoinder.* Young (in his work on sources, sounds and objects, including 'Hearing Objects and Events', *Philosophical Studies* 2018, and 'Sounds as Properties', *Thought* 2021) argues that Phenomenological Independence, Binding and Intimacy can all be made compatible with one another: perceptibly distinct things may appear bound as parts of a common whole, and demonstrative awareness of parts may secure reference to the whole. This is a route between strict Berkeleianism and strict Heideggerianism, and it has implications for spatial-hearing content, since it allows us to hear both the sound and its source as located, in the manner of part and whole. *The Nudds asymmetry.* Nudds's distinctive position is that *sources* have spatial content for us but *sounds* do not — what is heard as located is always the source, never the sound itself. This combines aspatialism about sounds with full spatialism about sources. The view is structurally elegant but has trouble accommodating cases where the sound is naturally heard as somewhere the source is not (echoes; recordings played through speakers). *The Kwok composite-individual move.* Young and Nanay's 'Audition and Composite Sensory Individuals' (*Philosophical Studies*, 2022) and Kwok's 2024 *Inquiry* paper both, in different ways, argue that the auditory sensory individual is *composite*: source plus sound, or source plus wave-pattern. This dissolves the forced choice between source-perception and sound-perception by allowing both to figure in a single perceptual representation. The spatial implication is that source location and wave/sound location can come apart in experience without thereby generating illusion: the auditory representation is of a single composite whose elements can be at different places (typical in echoes, in room reverberation, in recorded playback). **Where the debate stands.** This controversy looks the most alive of all, because every move in the location debate (§1), the metaphysics of sound debate (§3) and the auditory field debate (§2) takes a stand here, often implicitly. The composite-individual approach (Young/Nanay; Kwok) is the most plausible candidate for a settled middle ground, but the Heideggerian–Berkeleian dichotomy remains the way the disputes are often framed. The Leddington/Young exchange — Heideggerian source-priority with sounds as properties of source events versus part-whole pluralism with sounds as temporally extended properties of objects — is the focus. --- ## 9. Recent Work in the User's Circle and Building on the User's Papers Engagement with Young's work has grown steadily. *Hearing Spaces* (2017) is now a fixed point of reference in the empty-space and reverberation debates: Wilson (2023) cites it as 'illuminating' on the question of whether we literally hear space via reverberation; Skrzypulec (2022) is plainly building on it for the silence case; Mac Cumhaill's tactile-immersion work (2017) is a structural cousin. *Hearing Objects and Events* (*Philosophical Studies* 2018) anchors the Young/Nanay 'Audition and Composite Sensory Individuals' position; Leddington (2025) cites Young (2021) directly in motivating the property dimension of his event-property view. *Sounds as Properties* (*Thought* 2021) is now the standard objection to Leddington's locating sounds at events rather than objects, and is treated as such in Leddington's 2025 reply. The triangle Young / Leddington / Casati-Di-Bona-Dokic has emerged as the live property-view dialectic. Beyond Young's circle, the most active recent work spans: - **Casey O'Callaghan**, post-2020, has principally been developing his multisensory framework (*A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception*, OUP 2019; later articles), with less direct intervention in the spatial-hearing debate than in the 2007–2017 period; his earlier work continues to set the distal-event default position. - **Matthew Nudds**, post-2018, has principally written on the unitary nature of sound and on the philosophy of music; the 2009 'Sounds and Space' position remains the canonical statement of aspatialism. - **Mark Eli Kalderon**, post-2017, has continued to develop the wave-theoretic line (a manuscript on 'The Event of Rarefaction', and 'Sound and Image', forthcoming); the medial/emanative position is now better worked out than it was in *Sympathy in Perception*. - **Jason Leddington**, between 2019 and 2025, has produced the most concentrated body of recent work: 'Sounds Fully Simplified' (*Analysis* 2019), 'Sonic Pictures' (*JAAC* 2021), 'The Event-Property View of Sounds' (*Inquiry* 2025). - **Błażej Skrzypulec**, principally at Jagiellonian, has been the most prolific contributor to the spatial-hearing/silence/field debates, with 'Silence Perception and Spatial Content' (2022), 'Is There a Tactile Field?' (2022), 'Space and Perceptual Boundaries' (*Philosophical Studies* 2024), 'Egocentric Content and the Complex Subject' (*Erkenntnis* 2024), and the forthcoming work on perspectival content. - **Keith Wilson**, principally on the auditory field; the 2023 *Ergo* paper is the major recent contribution. - **Douglas Wadle**, the BJPS 2025 paper is the major recent contribution; earlier work on the senses and on multisensory features (in *Mandrigin/Wadle* discussions of 2020–21) is structurally relevant. - **Tony Cheng**, on spatial representations across modalities (*Mind and Language* 2022); editor (with Deroy and Spence) of *Spatial Senses* (Routledge 2019). - **Vincent Bergeron**, less active recently in this specific debate. - **Phillip John Meadows**, 'Experiencing Silence' (CJP 2020); broader work on auditory perception. - **Calvin Kwok**, *Hearing Waves* (Hong Kong PhD 2020) and 'Do We Hear Compression Waves?' (*Inquiry* 2024) — the most sustained recent defence of the wave view. - **Elvira Di Bona**, 'Towards a Rich View of Auditory Experience' (*Philosophical Studies* 2017), 'Why Space Matters to an Understanding of Sound' (in *Spatial Senses* 2019), the SEP entry (with Casati and Dokic, most recently Fall 2025), the book *Il suono* (with Santarcangelo, 2018), and recent work on disjointed accounts of auditory continuity (forthcoming, *Inquiry*). --- ## 10. Recent Papers (2023–2026) and Things to Watch Beyond the items already cited, the following are worth flagging: - The Stanford Encyclopedia entry 'Sounds' (Casati, Dokic and Di Bona, Fall 2025 edition) is now the standard taxonomy and is more sympathetic to property and event-property views than earlier editions. - Roope Ryymin's 2025 King's College London PhD, *On Perceiving Absences, Among Other Things*, treats silence and empty-space cases at length. - Elia Gonnella, 'Are Sounds Events? Materiality in Auditory Perception' (*Phenomenology and Mind* 25, 2023: 226–40), argues that materiality, rather than spatial location, is the key metaphysical determinant. - Ongoing empirical work on neural separation of source and reverberant-space representations (the 2024 *bioRxiv* preprint on sensory and decisional processes in reverberant environments) and on robust spatial hearing beyond primary interaural cues (*bioRxiv* August 2025) is increasingly being cited in the philosophical literature. - The Phillips/Goh/Firestone *PNAS* 2023 paper has not yet been the subject of a major philosophical reply; the natural reply targets the inference from illusion-substitution to the strong perceptual claim, and would link to Skrzypulec's directional-silence thesis. --- ## Conclusion: Where the Battle Lines Run The eight controversies cluster around three axes. **Axis I: how spatial is auditory experience?** Wilson (2023) and Young (2017) push it as far as visual experience or further; Wadle (2025) and Nudds (2009) push it as far back as a recognisable Strawsonian aspatialism; Kalderon (2017) reroutes it through emanative phenomenology. The debate is not about whether audition delivers spatial information (everyone grants this) but about whether *auditory experience itself* has rich, fine-grained, perceptually given spatial content, and to what extent that content is genuinely auditory rather than multisensory or premodal. **Axis II: where are sounds, and where are they heard to be?** The distal-event view has lost some of its mid-2000s dominance: Leddington's event-property view, Kwok's renewed wave theory, Wadle's restricted aspatialism and the composite-individual approach (Young/Nanay; implicit in Kwok) have all carved out positions that were not on the standard 2007 menu. Distal property views (now in two flavours, Pasnau-Kulvicki and Leddington) are again live. The medial wave view, having been treated as a non-starter in 2007 by O'Callaghan and others, is now defensible. **Axis III: source or sound?** This is the live controversy that drives the others. Heideggerian direct-source-perception views (Leddington, Casati/Di Bona/Dokic, Kalderon in his way) are gaining ground; pure Berkeleian views are increasingly hard to sustain in light of empirical work on auditory scene analysis and source perception; composite-individual views (Young/Nanay, Kwok) offer a principled middle road that respects Phenomenological Binding without collapsing sounds into sources. What is *not* settled, and where productive work is most available: (i) the directional-content question for silence (Skrzypulec's positive thesis is novel and has not yet been seriously contested); (ii) the structural details of an auditory field on the assumption that Wilson's general case is right (boundaries, occlusion, gaps, regions are still loosely worked out); (iii) the integration of the loudness-constancy data with the philosophical accounts of distance perception; (iv) the working-out of composite-individual views in a way that yields determinate predictions about the spatial content of the various things heard; (v) whether Wadle's restricted aspatialism really succeeds in carving off a *recognisable* auditory experience to which the phenomenal objection fails to apply, or whether it instead carves off an experience too thin to count as audition. Each of these would repay sustained treatment.