# Spatial Hearing in Analytic Philosophy Since 2006 ## Executive Summary Within analytic philosophy, the literature on spatial hearing since 2006 can be read as a debate with three connected layers. Okay, next paragraph is about objects, the objects of audition. It should mention the first sentence mentioned that for example those who think the sounds are at least somewhat separable from sources might be the wave view or the medium disturbing event view, both of which have different special locations, sometimes considered a error a worry about the wave theory as to whether because sound waves are all around us and so then we would seem to be hearing things not where they are if sound waves are what we're hearing because we normally hear sound what we hear as being at a particular location. Moving on to sources. Those who have property view of sounds would say that we hear sounds. Oh I don't know. Maybe problematize this? Maybe say maybe start the paragraph with where do we hear what we hear no maybe start the paragraph with depending on what one's commitments as to what we hear are this will determine where one hears, what one hears. Something like that? Help me out man. On PhilPapers, the field is anchored by Casey O'Callaghan and Matthew Nudds, especially through *Sounds* and *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*, and later extends through work by Nick Young, Ian Phillips, Błażej Skrzypulec, Keith A. Wilson, and others. The clearest conclusion from the corpus is that analytic philosophy of audition has moved steadily away from treating hearing as epistemically or phenomenologically thin. The strongest works in this literature argue that hearing is not merely a matter of detecting bare acoustic features. Rather, audition can represent source events, objects, their locations, reverberant volumes, spatial directions, and sometimes absences such as silence. The recent debate is no longer mainly about whether audition is spatial at all; it is about how it is spatial, what exactly is spatially represented, and whether the spatial character belongs to a minimal auditory modality, a richer everyday notion of audition, or a multisensory perceptual package. A second result is that silence became one of the field’s most productive test cases. Starting with Sorensen’s influential claim that silence is genuinely heard, later work by Phillips, O’Callaghan, Meadows, Gow, and Skrzypulec turned silence into a focal point for wider issues about absence perception, spatial content, hallucination, causal theories of perception, and the boundary between perceptual and cognitive representation. In the recent corpus, silence is not a side issue. It is a lever for theorizing auditory space itself. A third result is that the constrained PhilPapers corpus assembled here shows two large publication waves. The first is 2007–2013, driven by foundational ontology-and-content work and by the special concentration of chapters in *Sounds and Perception*. The second is 2017–2025, marked by renewed attention to hearing space itself, richer accounts of auditory content, musical and speech cases, and explicit disputes about auditory fields, wave theory, and aspatialism. This report’s publication chart is a tally of the curated top-30 corpus below, normalized to original publication year where PhilPapers displayed reprint years or multiple versions. ## Corpus Boundaries and Assumptions This report uses PhilPapers only, in keeping with the source constraint. I treated PhilPapers bibliographic metadata, abstracts, search-result snippets, category pages, and linked entry pages as the only admissible evidence base. I limited the ranked corpus to articles, book chapters, and books from 2006–present, and I excluded dissertations and encyclopedia entries from the top-30 table even when they were philosophically relevant or highly visible on PhilPapers. Two further assumptions are worth making explicit. First, because PhilPapers sometimes displays multiple entry versions or reprints of the same work, citation counts can vary across search-result clusters and specific entry pages. I therefore report the PhilPapers-visible count for the version or search result actually consulted, and I flag missing or unstable counts as “n/a” where needed. Second, because PhilPapers does not conveniently expose trustworthy global year totals without extensive scraping, the publication timeline and chart below summarize the ranked top-30 corpus, not every possibly relevant PhilPapers record. The language boundary should also be stated. I prioritized the English-language analytic-philosophy literature, because that is where the central debates on PhilPapers are concentrated and because you asked for an English report. A few adjacent non-English or phenomenological works appeared during the search, but the ranked table deliberately favors the English-language analytic core. The publication profile of the ranked corpus is shown below. The spike in 2009 reflects the importance of the edited collection *Sounds and Perception*, while the cluster in 2017 reflects a second major expansion around auditory space, richer auditory content, and music- or multisensory-adjacent applications. The sparse recent years do not indicate lack of interest; rather, they reflect the stringent top-30 selection under the source and genre constraints. ```mermaid timeline title Publication trend in the ranked PhilPapers top-30 corpus 2007 : Foundational event theory of sound in O'Callaghan's book 2009 : Major cluster around Sounds and Perception : Spatial hearing, sound location, and silence become central 2010 : Auditory-object debates consolidate 2011-2013 : Beyond-vision and silence debates deepen 2017-2018 : Renewed work on hearing space, musical space, richness, and event-hearing 2020-2022 : Silence, speech objects, and spatial content mature 2023-2025 : Auditory field, wave theory, and aspatialism explicitly re-open the spatiality question ``` ```mermaid xychart-beta title "Publication counts by year in the ranked top-30 corpus" x-axis [2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025] y-axis "Entries" 0 --> 6 bar [1, 1, 6, 3, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 5, 2, 0, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1] ``` ## Top 30 PhilPapers Entries Ranking method. The list below is ranked by direct topical relevance to spatial hearing broadly conceived, with PhilPapers citation counts used as a secondary ordering consideration. “PP cites” means the citation count visible on the PhilPapers entry or search result consulted; because PhilPapers versions and duplicates can differ, treat the numbers as entry-level indicators rather than a perfectly normalized bibliometric series. | Rank | Full bibliographic citation | Link | Type | Year | PP cites | Abstract or summary | |---|---|---|---|---:|---:|---| | 1 | O'Callaghan, Casey. *Sounds: A Philosophical Theory*. New York: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OCASAP) | Book | 2007 | 488 | The foundational monograph for the contemporary analytic philosophy of audition. O’Callaghan argues against both secondary-quality views and simple wave views, defending instead an event theory on which sounds are disturbances of a medium located at or near sources. The book matters for spatial hearing because its entire architecture is built around location, propagation, echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancy. It sets the agenda for later debates by insisting that a credible ontology of sound must answer to auditory phenomenology without collapsing into crude common sense. Nearly every later spatial-hearing paper on PhilPapers reacts to, modifies, or rejects some part of this framework. | | 2 | Nudds, Matthew, and Casey O'Callaghan (eds.). *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/NUDSAP-5) | Book | 2009 | 156 | This volume is the natural starting point for the field under your constraints. It consolidates the ontology of sound debate while also making spatiality, auditory objects, silence, speech, and musical listening central philosophical topics rather than fringe curiosities. The collection matters methodologically as well: it shows analytic philosophers using phenomenology, metaphysics, and empirically informed perception theory in systematic combination. Many of the most-cited and most relevant top-30 entries are chapters from this volume, which is why 2009 appears as the clearest publication spike in the constrained corpus assembled here. If one wants the emergence of spatial hearing as a distinct analytic topic, this volume is the inflection point. | | 3 | O'Callaghan, Casey. “Object Perception: Vision and Audition.” *Philosophy Compass* 3 (4): 803–829. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OCAOPV) | Article | 2008 | 137 | O’Callaghan’s paper broadens the debate from sounds to auditory objects. Starting from vision-centered theories of object perception, he argues that an analogue of object perception exists in audition as well. Spatial hearing is easier to theorize once hearing is allowed to present structured distal items rather than bare acoustic features. The paper also helps explain why later debates about streams, events, voices, and multisensory perception developed in tandem with debates about location and space. Even when later authors resist O’Callaghan’s specific theory, they typically accept the paper’s larger lesson: audition has a richer object structure than earlier philosophers assumed. | | 4 | Nudds, Matthew. “Sounds and Space.” In *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/NUDSAS) | Book chapter | 2009 | 105 | This chapter is one of the central direct engagements with auditory spatial phenomenology. PhilPapers indicates that the chapter gives an account of sounds as properties of sound waves while arguing that such a view is compatible with auditory spatial phenomenology. That makes it a major counterweight to strongly distal theories. Rather than denying that hearing is spatial, Nudds tries to show that spatial phenomenology underdetermines ontology. Later work by Kwok and Wadle shows how durable this strategy has been. In the top-30 corpus, this chapter is one of the clearest attempts to preserve a wave- or medium-friendly view without conceding that hearing is therefore radically illusory. | | 5 | O'Callaghan, Casey. “Sounds and Events.” In *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 26–49. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OCASAE) | Book chapter | 2009 | 108 | O’Callaghan’s chapter distils and defends his event ontology in a concise and highly cited form. He argues that sounds are not travelling pressure waves and not merely properties of sounding objects, but events in which a medium is disturbed by the activity of objects or interacting bodies. For spatial hearing, the point is direct: if sounds are events located at sources rather than propagating items moving through air, then common auditory phenomenology looks substantially veridical rather than massively misleading. The chapter bridges the larger 2007 book and the more focused location and object papers that followed, and it remains one of the field’s standard target texts. | | 6 | Sorensen, Roy. “Hearing Silence: The Perception and Introspection of Absences.” In *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*, 126–145. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/SORHST-4) | Book chapter | 2009 | 81 | Sorensen’s chapter is the canonical analytic defense of the claim that silence can literally be heard. It rejects the old Aristotelian assumption that hearing is exclusively of sounds and argues instead that silence is a special case of successful absence perception rather than a mere failure to hear. The importance for spatial hearing is deeper than it first appears. Once silence is admitted as a genuine auditory phenomenon, questions immediately arise about how it is individuated, located, and distinguished phenomenologically from non-auditory absence. Later disputes by Phillips, O’Callaghan, Meadows, Gow, and Skrzypulec can be read as different ways of managing the theoretical consequences of Sorensen’s initially surprising claim. | | 7 | Nudds, Matthew. “What Are Auditory Objects?” *Review of Philosophy and Psychology* 1 (1): 105–122. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/NUDWAA-3) | Article | 2010 | 75 | Nudds addresses how auditory experience groups sequences or parts of sounds into unified streams or objects. Auditory scene analysis is not treated as a merely empirical curiosity; it becomes evidence about the structure of perceptual content. Nudds argues that the experience of auditory objects cannot simply be reduced to hearing sounds plus post-perceptual grouping. Instead, stream-formation belongs to the character of auditory experience itself. The paper belongs in any broad account of spatial hearing, because locating, tracking, and segregating sources in space depends on there being structured auditory objects or streams to locate and follow. It remains a standard reference point for later auditory-object theory. | | 8 | Casati, Roberto, and Jérôme Dokic. “Some Varieties of Spatial Hearing.” In *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*, 97–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/CASSVO-5) | Book chapter | 2009 | 55 | This chapter is one of the most directly relevant items in the entire corpus. Casati and Dokic distinguish proximal, medium, and distal theories of sound according to where sounds are said to be located, then ask what spatial hearing itself favors. Their core claim is that phenomenology tends to support distal theories if it can be shown that sounds, rather than merely sources, are heard as located. This makes the chapter a conceptual map for much of the later debate. It is especially useful because it shows that “spatial hearing” is not a single phenomenon but a family of issues linking sound ontology, auditory phenomenology, and the relation between heard sounds and heard sources. | | 9 | O'Callaghan, Casey. “Perceiving the Locations of Sounds.” *Review of Philosophy and Psychology* 1 (1): 123–140. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OCAPTL-3) | Article | 2010 | 51 | This is perhaps the clearest statement of the thesis that hearing has genuine spatial content. O’Callaghan argues that audition is a locational mode of perception with rich spatial phenomenology. He defends three claims: hearing gives information about locations because auditory experience itself is spatial; we hear the locations of things and events by or in hearing the locations of sounds; and sounds are experienced as having stable distal locations. The paper both grounds a strong spatial-audition thesis and sets up the later opposition from wave theorists and restricted aspatialists, who deny that these phenomenological claims settle sound ontology or auditory content so straightforwardly. | | 10 | O'Callaghan, Casey. “Lessons from beyond vision.” *Philosophical Studies* 153 (1): 143–160. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OCALFB) | Article | 2011 | 65 | O’Callaghan uses audition to push back against vision-centered models of perception. The paper’s importance for spatial hearing lies in its methodological thesis: philosophers have misdescribed perception in part because they have generalized too quickly from visual cases. Hearing brings out forms of object perception, spatial representation, and multimodal integration that visual-first theories obscure. As a result, the paper became a touchstone far beyond the philosophy of audition itself. In the present corpus, it helps explain why later work on auditory space is not merely local “philosophy of sound,” but part of a larger anti-visuocentric reorientation in philosophy of perception. | | Rank | Full bibliographic citation | Link | Type | Year | PP cites | Abstract or summary | |---|---|---|---|---:|---:|---| | 11 | Matthen, Mohan. “On the Diversity of Auditory Objects.” *Review of Philosophy and Psychology* 1 (1): 63–89. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/MATAO) | Article | 2010 | 47 | Matthen argues that direct auditory objects are more diverse than philosophers usually suppose. They are composed of sounds, but they are not all themselves simple sounds; rather, melodies, harmonies, voices, phoneme-sequences, and other temporally extended structures can all be directly heard. The paper matters for spatial hearing because it widens the space of candidate auditory individuals that can be located, tracked, and attended to. It also explains why auditory scene analysis has such philosophical depth: the objects of hearing are structured by temporal composition and attention in ways unlike visual objects. The paper is useful for anyone trying to connect source-hearing, stream-segregation, and spatial awareness within a single theory. | | 12 | O'Shaughnessy, Brian. “The Location of a Perceived Sound.” In *Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays*. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OSHTLO-4) | Book chapter | 2009 | 44 | PhilPapers does not display an abstract on the entry I consulted, but the chapter’s title and its place in the 2009 volume make its significance straightforward. It is one of the clearest chapter-length treatments devoted specifically to the location of heard sounds, and later work by O’Callaghan and Wadle is explicitly connected to it in PhilPapers’ citation and similarity structure. In the context of the volume, the chapter belongs to the core debate over whether hearing presents sounds, sources, or both as spatially located, and what kind of locational content auditory experience can sustain. It is best read as part of the canonical first-generation map of analytic spatial-hearing theory. | | 13 | Phillips, Ian. “Hearing and Hallucinating Silence.” In Fiona Macpherson and Dimitris Platchias (eds.), *Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 333 ff. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/PHIHA) | Book chapter | 2013 | 57 | Phillips takes on the increasingly popular idea that silence is literally heard and asks whether silence can also be hallucinated. The abstract visible on PhilPapers describes the traditional cognitive view, according to which one does not hear silence but only hears that it is silent because one lacks auditory experience. Phillips rejects easy reliance on ordinary talk while also criticising Sorensen’s account for implying that the profoundly deaf would constantly hallucinate silence. The chapter sharply formulates what later silence theorists must explain: the causal, phenomenal, and epistemic conditions under which silence could count as a genuine auditory object or content. It remains one of the field’s standard critical interventions. | | 14 | Casati, Roberto, Elvira Di Bona, and Jérôme Dokic. “The Ockhamization of the Event Sources of Sound.” *Analysis* 73 (3): 462–466. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/CASTOO) | Article | 2013 | 48 | Casati, Di Bona, and Dokic argue that there is one item too many in the standard triad of sound, event source, and thing source. Their proposal is to identify sounds with sound sources—or more exactly with event sources—rather than treat them as distinct entities standing in close phenomenological proximity. The attraction of the view is partly Ockhamist simplicity, but also the claim that phenomenology does not force a distinction between sounds and their sources. This paper is central because it compresses the metaphysical debate into its sharpest form and directly pressures O’Callaghan’s event-part view. For spatial hearing, the issue is decisive: if sounds just are source events, distal phenomenal location becomes explanatorily easier to respect. | | 15 | Allen-Hermanson, Sean. “Introspection, Anton’s Syndrome, and Human Echolocation.” *Pacific Philosophical Quarterly* 98 (2): 171–192. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/ALLIAS-12) | Article | 2017 | 7 | Allen-Hermanson’s article is more epistemological than ontological, but it belongs in any broad spatial-hearing corpus because it uses human echolocation to assess the reliability of introspection about perceptual experience. He argues that familiar skeptical lessons drawn from Anton’s syndrome, facial vision, and human echolocation are overstated. For spatial hearing, the paper is valuable because it shows that cases of navigational audition and echo-based environmental awareness are not merely empirical curiosities: they can reshape core debates about access to phenomenal character, self-knowledge, and modality boundaries. It is especially useful as a bridge text between philosophy of mind, perceptual epistemology, and the philosophy of non-visual spatial awareness. | | 16 | Young, Nick. “Hearing Spaces.” *Australasian Journal of Philosophy* 95 (2): 242–255. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/YOUHS) | Article | 2017 | 25 | Young argues that empty space can be heard. His primary case is reverberation in enclosed environments: when a sound reverberates, we do not merely hear an extra sound or an echo-like effect, but represent the volume of surrounding space itself. The paper is among the strongest direct defences of spatial audibility in the corpus, and it directly challenges the traditional restriction of hearing to sounds, sound-properties, or sources. The argument also asks what indirect-belief story would be needed if space were not genuinely heard. Later work by Skrzypulec, Wilson, and Gow can all be read as extensions or refinements of Young’s provocation. | | 17 | Di Bona, Elvira. “Towards a Rich View of Auditory Experience.” *Philosophical Studies* 174 (11): 2629–2643. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/DIBTAR-2) | Article | 2017 | 40 | The PhilPapers entry identifies this paper as an influential step toward what Di Bona later calls a “rich view” of audition, and later related entries connect it to auditory streams, musical experience, and Gestalt-based accounts of auditory organisation. On that basis, the paper resists sparse pictures of hearing according to which audition presents only low-level sounds or features. Instead, it pushes toward a richer account on which organised auditory items and their structure belong to perceptual experience itself. That makes it relevant to spatial hearing in the broad sense, because richer auditory content makes room for source-hearing, stream-segregation, and environmentally structured auditory awareness. | | 18 | Di Bona, Elvira. “Listening to the Space of Music.” *Rivista di Estetica* 66: 93–105. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/DIBLTT) | Article | 2017 | 19 | This paper moves the spatial-hearing debate into the philosophy of music. PhilPapers does not display the abstract in the result consulted, but the title, venue, and its later connections to “hearing chimeras” strongly suggest a thesis on which musical listening can include awareness of spatially structured auditory organization, not merely abstract tonal or temporal relations. Its importance in the present corpus is twofold. First, it widens the debate beyond ordinary environmental sound into aesthetically inflected listening. Second, it shows that “auditory space” is not exhausted by locating ordinary sources in egocentric space; it also includes the experienced spatial organization of musical auditory scenes. | | 19 | O'Callaghan, Casey. “Hearing Properties, Effects, or Parts?” In *Beyond Vision: Philosophical Essays*, 95–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/OCAHPE-2) | Book chapter | 2017 | 51 | This chapter revisits the central question of how sounds and sources are related in experience. O’Callaghan rejects the idea that sounds are simply properties instantiated by sources; he also rejects simple effect-based characterizations that would detach sounds too far from their worldly bases. Instead, he continues to defend a view on which sounds are audible individuals related to, but not reducible to, their sources. Spatially, the chapter matters because it refines the metaphysical picture needed to explain how hearing can seem both source-directed and sound-directed at once. It is one of the clearest later-stage statements of O’Callaghan’s mature view and a key reference point for subsequent rival theories. | | 20 | Meadows, Phillip John. “In Defense of Medial Theories of Sound.” *American Philosophical Quarterly* 55 (3): 293–302. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/MEAIDO-2) | Article | 2018 | 14 | Meadows explicitly defends medial theories, which identify sounds more closely with features of the medium rather than with distal source events. After O’Callaghan, this makes the paper a serious analytic attempt to preserve non-distal ontology without simply dismissing the phenomenology of hearing. The article belongs in the top 30 because it shows that resistance to distal or source-based theories remained philosophically live well after the field’s supposed consensus had formed. It is useful alongside Kwok’s later wave-theoretic work, since both attempt to show that one can take acoustics seriously without abandoning the phenomenology of ordinary hearing or collapsing into total error theory. | | 21 | Young, Nick. “Hearing Objects and Events.” *Philosophical Studies* 175 (11): 2931–2950. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/YOUHOA-2) | Article | 2018 | 10 | Young investigates the familiar thought that we hear source events themselves rather than merely hearing sounds and then inferring causes. The paper focuses on how hearing events relates to hearing the objects involved in those events. Its significance lies in clarifying a major ambiguity in the literature: “hearing events” can mean hearing the occurrence itself, hearing the event through its sound, or hearing structured interactions among objects in ways that integrate source and sound. For the philosophy of spatial hearing, this matters because event-hearing is a key route by which audition gives us distal access to the world. The paper helps tie together source-hearing, object-hearing, and spatial hearing in a single framework. | | 22 | Meadows, Phillip John. “Experiencing Silence.” *Canadian Journal of Philosophy* 50 (2): 238–250. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/MEAES) | Article | 2020 | 8 | Meadows revisits the silence debate by identifying three central claims in the recent literature: that silence experiences are maximally “negative,” that silences do not cause our experiences, and that hearing silence is hearing a temporal region devoid of sound. He objects especially to the Phillips–Soteriou line and argues that its framing of silence is less secure than it appears. The paper is one of the most careful post-Sorensen attempts to clean up the debate conceptually. It is relevant to spatial hearing because silence cases force philosophers to specify whether auditory experience presents merely temporal gaps or also spatially structured absence, and whether those structures are genuinely phenomenal or merely cognitive overlays. | | 23 | Drożdżowicz, Anna. “Bringing Back the Voice: On the Auditory Objects of Speech Perception.” *Synthese*: 1–27. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/DROBBT) | Article | 2020 | 9 | Drożdżowicz argues that in hearing familiar speech we perceive both speech sounds and the individual voice producing them, and that these appear as a unified auditory object. She proposes that such objects are temporally structured, mereologically complex individuals, and gives a psychological account of their individuation. The paper is not about spatial hearing narrowly, but it belongs in the broad brief because it extends auditory-object theory into a socially and linguistically important domain. It shows how stability, predictability, and identity can be carried by auditory structure itself. In spatial terms, speech perception becomes a case of hearing organised distal individuals rather than bare acoustic fragments. | | 24 | Gow, Laura. “Empty Space, Silence, and Absence.” *Canadian Journal of Philosophy* 51 (7): 496–507. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/GOWESS) | Article | 2021 | 12 | Gow takes aim at a tempting assimilation: if we can see empty space and hear silence, perhaps these are simply two paradigmatic forms of perceiving absences. She resists that move. Remaining neutral on whether the experiences are genuinely perceptual, she argues that empty-space experiences and silence experiences should not straightforwardly be classified as absence experiences. The paper prevents the literature from treating all “negative” cases as theoretically interchangeable. In the present corpus, Gow’s paper marks a sorting moment: the field begins distinguishing auditory space, auditory silence, and absence perception more carefully instead of folding them into a single metaphysical package. | | Rank | Full bibliographic citation | Link | Type | Year | PP cites | Abstract or summary | |---|---|---|---|---:|---:|---| | 25 | Skrzypulec, Błażej. “Silence Perception and Spatial Content.” *Australasian Journal of Philosophy* 100 (3): 524–538. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/SKRSPA-2) | Article | 2022 | 8 | Skrzypulec gives one of the strongest recent defences of spatially articulated silence experience. Drawing on psychological work on auditory attention, he argues that silence experiences can have genuinely auditory phenomenal content and, more specifically, egocentric spatial content. On his proposal, experiences of silence can present empty directions such as left or right. This converts the silence debate into a debate about auditory spatial representation itself. Rather than treating silence as a merely temporal lack, Skrzypulec argues that auditory phenomenology can present structured empty space. The paper is already clearly influential on Wilson and on later work about boundaries and multisensory structure. | | 26 | Di Bona, Elvira. “Hearing Chimeras.” *Synthese* 200 (3): 1–20. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/DIBHC) | Article | 2022 | 7 | PhilPapers connects this paper to auditory streams, musical streams, Gestalt principles, and Di Bona’s earlier rich-view program. The piece therefore seems to extend the thought that organized auditory experience can include perceptually unified but structurally complex auditory items—“chimeras”—that resist simple source-based descriptions. Even without the full abstract visible, the indexed keywords make its place in the broader literature clear. It is relevant here because spatial hearing broadly conceived is not only about coordinate-like location; it is also about how auditory scenes are grouped, segregated, and organized into perceptual unities. In that respect, “hearing chimeras” belongs to the modern philosophical afterlife of auditory scene analysis. | | 27 | Wilson, Keith A. “The Auditory Field: The Spatial Character of Auditory Experience.” *Ergo* 9 (40): 1080–1106. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/WILTAF-8) | Article | 2023 | 6 | Wilson directly challenges the longstanding scepticism that audition lacks anything analogous to a visual field. He argues that common objections to an auditory field are misguided and that auditory experience is richly spatial, in some ways even more so than visual experience. Earlier work often asked whether sounds are spatially located; Wilson instead asks whether audition exhibits the bounded, structured, environmental organisation needed for a sensory field. That move helps integrate reverberation, silence, and surrounding acoustic environment into a single picture. The article is already becoming a new reference point for anyone working on auditory space, spatial boundaries, or non-visual field theory. | | 28 | Pillot, Angéle, and Frédérique de Vignemont. “Feeling Presence in the Dark.” *Journal of Consciousness Studies* 31 (11): 175–197. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/PILFPI) | Article | 2024 | n/a | Pillot and de Vignemont argue for a distinctive mode of spatial awareness in blind individuals that they call a “sense of volume.” On their account, this is not ordinary echolocation based on self-generated clicks. Rather, it depends on ambient sound-field variation and yields coarse locational awareness of things being present at certain distances and directions. They interpret this not as full object perception but as a rudimentary sense of worldly presence with a tactile anticipatory character. The paper matters for broad conceptions of spatial hearing because it brings blindness studies, bodily anticipation, and non-objectual spatial awareness into contact with analytic debates normally framed in terms of sound ontology alone. | | 29 | Kwok, Calvin K. W. “Do We Hear Compression Waves?” *Inquiry* 67 (9): 3140–3168. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/KWODWH) | Article | 2024 | 1 | Kwok reopens the wave theory of sound by addressing the spatial misrepresentation objection. That objection says that if sounds are compression waves, then hearing is massively illusory because ordinary experience does not represent sounds as propagating through the medium. Kwok argues instead that wave theory correctly implies that we do not hear sounds as propagating, and that this need not be a decisive problem. The paper is one of the clearest recent attempts to disentangle sound ontology from naive phenomenological expectations. Within the current corpus, it matters less for citation impact than for argumentative form: it makes wave-theory resistance to distalism newly explicit and technically focused. | | 30 | Wadle, Douglas C. “Restricted Auditory Aspatialism.” *British Journal for the Philosophy of Science* 76 (1): 173–207. | [PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/rec/WADRAA-2) | Article | 2025 | 2 | Wadle argues that the standard phenomenal objection to auditory aspatialism is weaker than many philosophers assume. He distinguishes a minimal but recognizable notion of audition for which the familiar spatial phenomenology claim does not straightforwardly apply, and then argues that more expansive, everyday notions of audition may include multisensory elements whose spatial character should not be used to settle the metaphysics of sound too quickly. The paper is probably the sharpest recent skeptical pushback in the spatial-audition debate. It does not simply deny that everyday hearing seems spatial. Instead, it questions whether that fact licenses the metaphysical conclusions often drawn from it. As a result, it reopens first-wave disputes under better methodological conditions. | ## Thematic Synthesis The literature clusters around five debates. The first is where sounds are. O’Callaghan’s event theory, Nudds’s property-of-wave strategy, the Casati-Dokic taxonomy of proximal/medium/distal theories, Meadows’s defense of medial theories, Kwok’s renewed wave-theory defense, and Wadle’s restricted aspatialism all address the same core problem: how to reconcile acoustic theory, common talk, and auditory phenomenology without overcommitting either to naive realism or to global error theory. This is one way of stating the pressure that runs through much of the field. The second is what hearing presents as its objects. Here the major shift is from sparse to rich models of auditory content. Nudds and Matthen make auditory objects and streams central; O’Callaghan extends object-perception theory to audition; Young clarifies the relation between hearing objects and hearing source events; Drożdżowicz shows how voices and speech sounds can form unified auditory objects; and Di Bona’s rich-view work pushes toward more structured, organized auditory contents. Philosophically, this means that spatial hearing is no longer simply “hearing where a sound comes from.” It includes segregating, grouping, and tracking temporally structured auditory individuals. The third is whether hearing is directly spatial. O’Callaghan’s explicit locational thesis, Young’s case for hearing empty space through reverberation, Wilson’s auditory-field theory, and Skrzypulec’s claim that silence can present empty directions all defend increasingly rich spatial content. Their shared intuition is that auditory experience is not merely a non-spatial detection system supplemented by inference. Rather, some spatial awareness belongs to auditory experience itself. Yet these authors disagree about what exactly is spatially represented: located sounds, source events, volumes of empty space, directional absences, or the broader acoustic environment. The fourth is absence perception and the auditory limit case. Sorensen starts by insisting that silence is genuinely heard. Phillips, O’Callaghan, Meadows, Gow, and Skrzypulec then dispute what kind of thing that means. Is silence an auditory object, an absence, a temporal region, a representationally structured empty direction, or something that ordinary phenomenology encourages us to reify too quickly? The debate is philosophically productive because it forces theorists to specify the causal, phenomenal, and intentional conditions of auditory perception more generally. Silence serves the literature much as hallucination serves vision: as a hard case that reveals the commitments of broader theories. The fifth is method. The strongest work in this subfield rarely relies on armchair phenomenology alone. Instead, it uses a mixed method: first-person phenomenological description; metaphysical argument about sounds, sources, and events; sensitivity to psychoacoustics, reverberation, auditory attention, scene analysis, or echolocation; and, increasingly, comparison with other modalities. O’Callaghan’s anti-visuocentrism, Phillips’s hallucination framing, Skrzypulec’s use of auditory-attention psychology, and Pillot–de Vignemont’s treatment of blind spatial awareness illustrate the field’s most successful style: analytic argument informed by empirical constraint, but not overwritten by it. Influence is concentrated, but not monolithic. O’Callaghan is the dominant architect of the field’s agenda; Nudds supplies the main objections and alternative frameworks; Casati and Dokic provide classificatory and revisionary interventions; Sorensen and Phillips make silence philosophically central; Young extends the debate into empty space and event hearing; Di Bona widens the conception of auditory content; Meadows and Kwok keep medial and wave-friendly theories alive; and Wilson and Wadle re-open the most explicit recent dispute over whether audition is spatially field-like or can be minimally aspatial. ## Essential Reading List If the goal is to understand the subfield rather than merely sample it, these ten works are the natural starting points. O’Callaghan, *Sounds: A Philosophical Theory* (2007). This is still the indispensable starting point because it systematises the ontology of sound, ties that ontology to spatial hearing, and frames the later disputes over echoes, reverberation, and location. Nudds and O’Callaghan (eds.), *Sounds and Perception* (2009). No single source better captures the emergence of analytic philosophy of audition as a recognizable research program. The collection also remains the best way to see how spatiality, silence, sound ontology, and auditory objects interlock. O’Callaghan, “Perceiving the Locations of Sounds” (2010). Read this for the clearest defense of the claim that auditory experience itself has spatial content. Later spatial-field and aspatialist debates presuppose this paper. Nudds, “What Are Auditory Objects?” (2010). This is the key paper for understanding how auditory scene analysis enters philosophy as a claim about perceptual content rather than mere post-perceptual organization. Casati and Dokic, “Some Varieties of Spatial Hearing” (2009). This is the best short conceptual map of the ontology–phenomenology interface in spatial hearing. It is ideal for orienting the debate. Sorensen, “Hearing Silence” (2009). This is the axial text for the silence debate. Even if one rejects its conclusion, later work makes less sense without it. Phillips, “Hearing and Hallucinating Silence” (2013). The best philosophical pressure test for theories that too quickly assimilate silence to ordinary perceived objects or contents. Young, “Hearing Spaces” (2017). The strongest direct argument in the corpus that empty space itself can be heard by way of reverberation. It changed the tone of later debates about auditory space. Skrzypulec, “Silence Perception and Spatial Content” (2022). This is the most philosophically sophisticated recent statement of the view that silence can carry egocentric spatial content. It is the clearest place to see silence becoming a theory of auditory space. Wilson, “The Auditory Field” (2023). For the current state of the explicitly spatial debate, this is the best recent entry point. It reframes the issue around field structure rather than isolated location claims and is already shaping the next phase of the discussion. ## Gaps and Open Questions The most obvious gap is that auditory scene analysis is still under-philosophized relative to its importance. Philosophers now talk comfortably about auditory objects and streams, but there is still too little systematic work on how classic empirical findings about segregation, grouping, continuity, masking, and source tracking should bear on theories of perceptual content, objecthood, and spatial awareness. The literature is stronger on isolated paradigmatic cases than on full auditory scenes. A second gap concerns the unit of auditory spatial content. Different authors variously treat the represented item as a sound, a source, an event, a volume, an empty direction, or a multisensory environmental structure. The field has not reached a stable taxonomy of these representational units, and sometimes papers argue past each other because they are using different assumptions about what audition fundamentally presents. This remains the main obstacle to convergence between distalists, wave theorists, field theorists, and restricted aspatialists. A third open question is whether auditory spatiality is unimodal or inherently multisensory in ordinary life. Wadle’s intervention makes this especially pressing: perhaps the spatial richness cited by defenders of auditory space partly belongs to wider multisensory experience rather than to a strictly minimal auditory modality. That issue also bears on the interpretation of echolocation, blind navigation, and ambient-sound-based presence. The literature still lacks a stable criterion for when a spatial feature counts as auditory rather than merely co-conscious with hearing. A fourth gap is the relative underdevelopment of auditory epistemology. The corpus strongly suggests that hearing can provide richly structured access to objects, events, directions, and absences, but there is still relatively little top-tier analytic work connecting those claims to broader debates about perceptual justification, demonstrative thought, perceptual learning, or first-person authority. The few explicitly epistemological works are outnumbered by metaphysical and phenomenological ones. A fifth and more practical limitation is genre imbalance. PhilPapers reveals a lot of chapter-based foundational work and then a later spread across journal articles, but comparatively little book-length analytic work on auditory space after the foundational period. That suggests room for a synoptic monograph able to unite sound ontology, auditory objects, silence, reverberation, musical space, speech, blind spatial awareness, and multisensory field theory under one account. ## Recommended PhilPapers Queries and Filters The most efficient PhilPapers strategy is to combine topic strings with category filters and then sort by relevance or citation impact. Under your constraints, I would recommend the following query set first: `spatial hearing`, `auditory spatial perception`, `locations of sounds`, `auditory objects`, `hearing space`, `auditory field`, `silence perception`, `human echolocation`, `sound ontology`, `wave theory of sound`, `hearing source events`, and `auditory scene analysis`. In practice, the most productive queries were those that paired direct spatial terms with nearby analytic-theory terms such as `sound`, `hearing`, `objects`, `events`, `silence`, and `space`. On PhilPapers itself, the most useful filters are the subject categories Hearing, Sound, Spatial Experience, Philosophy of Perception, and, for the newer literature, Crossmodal Perception and sometimes Representation in Cognitive Science. The browse pages for Hearing and Spatial Experience were especially productive because they surface recent and philosophically categorized work that generic keyword search can bury. For genre control, filter to journal articles, book chapters, and books, and exclude encyclopedia entries and dissertations if the goal is a clean analytic-philosophy literature review. For ranking, I recommend first sorting by relevance, then manually checking citation counts, because raw citation rank overweights foundational sound ontology and underweights directly spatial but newer papers such as Wilson, Skrzypulec, Kwok, and Wadle. For year control, normalize reprints to the original publication year when the PhilPapers entry displays both an original and a later reprint. Two concrete PhilPapers search workflows are especially good. First, the foundational workflow: search `sound ontology`, `locations of sounds`, `spatial hearing`, and then open the entries for O’Callaghan, Nudds, Casati/Dokic, Sorensen, and O’Shaughnessy. This reconstructs the first wave of the debate. Second, the recent-wave workflow: search `hearing spaces`, `silence perception spatial content`, `auditory field`, `compression waves`, and `auditory aspatialism`. This reconstructs the current phase of the debate about how strong the spatiality of audition really is, and whether silence and reverberation should be treated as central evidence rather than edge cases. ## Open Questions and Limitations The strongest limitation of this report is the PhilPapers-only constraint. That keeps the report tightly focused and source-disciplined, but it also means the bibliometric picture is a picture of PhilPapers indexing and visible entry-version metadata, not a fully normalized external citation analysis. Where PhilPapers showed duplicate or reprint versions, citation counts could diverge, and I flagged that as an entry-level rather than corpus-wide measure. A second limitation is that a few topically relevant works on PhilPapers do not display full abstracts on the consulted entry pages. In those cases, I supplied cautious summaries based on the visible metadata, nearby keywords, and the work’s position within the clearly cited PhilPapers debate structure. Those cases do not alter the main conclusions, but they do modestly reduce confidence in the fine-grained interpretation of a handful of entries compared with the abstract-rich core.