# Against Hearing Sounds The idea that we hear sounds is thoroughly ingrained in our commonsense understanding of audition. It just seems obvious that we hear bangs, clangs, crashes, and splashes. Philosophical inquiries into auditory perception take sounds as their starting point: there are various accounts of what sounds are, and of how hearing them relates to the hearing of *source events* — movements and interactions of material objects, such as collisions, breakings, and scrapings, which lead to the production of sound waves. I shall argue that common sense and philosophical orthodoxy are incorrect. We do not hear any of the aspects of the world that philosophers have identified as sounds: source events are heard directly, without any sonic intermediary. In §1 I set out the reasons for thinking that source events are heard. In §2 I outline the main accounts of what sounds are and how hearing them is supposed to relate to hearing sources. In §3 I argue that of the considerations supporting source hearing, only one can be claimed on sounds' behalf: that we *seem to hear* them. In §4 I argue that we do not. In §5 I explain how the belief that we seem to hear sounds could have arisen in the absence of any such seeming. In §6 I respond to two objections. ## 1. Hearing Sources Source events are interactions or movements of material objects, which lead to those objects vibrating and producing sound waves in the surrounding air. Providing that those sound waves are above a certain amplitude and within a certain frequency range, they elicit auditory experiences in any listener in the vicinity: if I slam a door and drop a glass, you will have an auditory experience corresponding to each event. While Berkeley thought that "in truth and strictness nothing can be heard but sound" (1713/2012, p. 67), it is now very uncommon to endorse such an austere approach: practically all contemporary philosophers interested in audition hold that source events are heard, not inferred. There are four reasons for agreeing with them. First, audition often provides immediate awareness of source events. If I slam the door, you learn, without conscious effort, that a collision between two wooden objects has taken place; if I drop a glass, you learn that something fragile has not survived its impact against something more sturdy. This speedy awareness of sources and their features is comparable to our visual awareness of objects and their properties: the woodenness and rapid movement of a door are revealed as the door is slammed, just as its colour and shape are revealed by a quick glance. The fact that vision provides immediate awareness of objects makes it natural to think that objects are seen; auditory awareness of sources is equally swift. Second, source events stand in straightforward causal relations to auditory experiences. Plausibly, one constraint on our perceiving a particular feature of our environment is that the feature has caused our perception of it in the right sort of way: if my visual experience of an apple is elicited by light reflecting from an apple onto my retinas, it seems correct to say I am seeing that apple. Source events stand in a similarly straightforward relation to auditory experiences: the movements of objects lead to vibrations, which produce sound waves, which elicit auditory experiences. That which stands as the proper cause of a perceptual experience is a candidate for the object of that experience; since sources are proper causes of auditory experiences, they are candidates for the proper objects of audition. Third, the auditory system groups sound waves together based on the sources that have produced them, and in doing so produces auditory experiences which *correspond* to those sources. In a noisy environment, sound waves from multiple source events hit our eardrums at the same time, but rather than a single cacophonic mix we are in most cases able to separate what we hear into distinct streams and attend to one rather than the others. Grouping is achieved by exploiting spectral and temporal features of sound waves: objects tend to vibrate at multiple, harmonically related frequencies simultaneously, and the auditory system groups together sound waves which are harmonically related in this way; the frequency components produced by a single source event are also likely to begin, or change in amplitude, synchronously, and this too serves as a cue. If the auditory system generates experiences from sound waves grouped by source, sources make plausible candidates for the objects of those experiences. Fourth, auditory grouping based on sources is likely to occur because the function of auditory perception is to provide us with information about sources. As Nudds puts it, "Auditory perception, like vision, functions to tell us about objects in our environment" (2010a, p. 109). Our ancestors would have had an interest in the activities of material things because those events might herald danger, possible prey, or a possible mate; if keeping track of source events was advantageous, we might expect to be endowed with auditory systems which track, and produce experiences of, source events. None of these considerations shows conclusively that sources must be heard, but together they give phenomenological, causal, and functional grounds for wanting an account of audition on which sources are heard. My claim will be that sources are *all* that we hear. ## 2. Hearing Sounds Commonplace as it is to think that we hear sources, it seems very natural to say that we also hear the sounds they produce: slamming the door makes a thud, smashing the glass makes a crunch. Most contemporary views of what sounds are fall into two broad categories: those on which sounds are *individuals* produced by sources, and those on which they are *properties* of sources. The default, non-philosophical way of thinking about sounds is a version of the first: sounds are sound waves, produced in the air by vibrating objects, a view with some philosophical proponents (O'Shaughnessy 2002; Sorensen 2008, pp. 280–283). While Nudds does not identify sounds with sound waves, he maintains that the two are intimately connected: sounds are "structures or patterns of frequency components ... instantiated by sound waves, that would normally be interpreted by the auditory system as having been produced by a single source event" (2010b, p. 290). O'Callaghan has criticised the identification of sounds with waves (2007, ch. 2), and argues for a different kind of individual: events of the air (or some other medium) surrounding an object being "disturbed or set into motion in a wavelike manner" (ibid., p. 64) by that object's vibrations. Casati, Di Bona and Dokic (2013) go one step further and identify sounds with source events themselves: "The collision you hear is the sound you hear; the vibration of the stuff the tuning fork is made of is the sound" (2013, pp. 2–3). Property views date back at least to Locke. Pasnau (1999) argues that sounds are features objects are heard to take on when they vibrate; Kulvicki (2008; 2014) that they are permanent dispositions of objects to vibrate at certain frequencies, revealed to listeners upon stimulation; Leddington (2014; 2019) that sounds are properties borne by source events themselves: we hear the door-slamming event as bearing a particular property, rather than the door. Those who accept both that we hear sounds and that we hear sources owe an account of how hearing one relates to hearing the other. Nudds suggests that perception of sources is achieved by hearing sounds as *having been caused by* source events (2010a, p. 118); O'Callaghan (2011) that we hear sounds as *parts* of source events, in something like the way that seeing the facing surface of an object allows for perception of the whole; on property views, we hear sources *in* hearing their sounds, as Leddington puts it (2014, p. 324), much as we see objects in seeing their colours. What is common to all these positions is that sounds stand between listeners and the things they care about hearing. Kulvicki describes the picture frankly: > A veil of sound stands between subjects and what they care about hearing. The whole town hears the train rumble over the bridge down by the river, but the train, the bridge, and the crossing are only heard because of the sounds they make. Sounds are heard, and anything else heard thereby. By contrast, there is no veil of sights. (2017, p. [REF]) ## 3. What Would Justify Sounds? We have seen four reasons for accepting that sources are heard. Can parallel reasons be given for sounds? Ordinary language, admittedly, is on their side: we speak of hearing sounds all the time. It is questionable how much weight this should carry. We frequently talk of seeing things that, when pushed, we would deny really seeing, and the language of sounds is in any case ambiguous between the individual and property readings: we speak of hearing *a* sound, but also of objects as *having* pleasant or unpleasant sounds. Ordinary talk, I shall suggest in §5, is here more of a hindrance than a help. Considerations of function fare worse. Sound waves, medium disturbances, and vibratory dispositions are not dangerous or edible; tracking them provides no advantage in and of itself. One could reply that tracking them alerts us to sources, but this invites the question of why the auditory system would evolve to track items one removed from the features of the environment that matter, rather than going straight to the source. Nor is there an argument from grouping: the auditory system's organisation of its input is by source, which is precisely what makes sources, rather than anything sonic, the natural candidates for what is heard. Causation gives the defender of sounds a little more. Waves, disturbances, and vibrations all stand in straightforward causal relations to auditory experiences. But causation makes something a candidate for perception, no more. Light hitting our retinas is the immediate cause of visual experience, yet few would say that we see light; we say that we see the objects from which the light has been reflected. What is needed, over and above causation, is *phenomenal presence*. Budek and Farkas put the requirement as follows: > Perhaps [visual] experiences carry information about states of the retina, states of the optic nerve; perhaps a visual experience of the lights being on next door signals that the neighbor is at home. But the reason why we say that neither the retina, nor the neighbor is the object of the perception—that we don't *see* the retina or the neighbor—is that they are not phenomenally present in the experience. We don't seem to see these things when having the experience—we see (or at least seem to see) simply the lights. (2014, p. 360) This is not a foolproof method for determining exactly what is perceived, but it is a good way of whittling down the candidates. Audition makes sound sources phenomenally present — when the door is slammed, it seems that a collision between two heavy wooden objects has taken place — but it does not make our cochleas present, and the former, not the latter, are therefore plausible candidates for what we hear. This leaves the defender of sounds with one serious resource, and it is the one on which the orthodoxy in fact rests: the claim that sounds, too, are phenomenally present. Is it not simply obvious that we *seem* to hear sounds? ## 4. Do We Seem to Hear Sounds? On reflection, it is not obvious at all. Auditory experience does not make sound waves, medium disturbances, or vibratory dispositions phenomenally present. Audition presents sources as being large or small, as made of a certain material, as being struck or scraped; it does not seem to tell us anything about the properties of waves or dispositions as such. A listener with no conception of acoustics — a young child, a dog — hears doors slamming and glasses breaking without any accompanying impression of a wavelike disturbance rippling through the air. There is a natural reply. Perhaps sounds are like colours: phenomenologically obvious, metaphysically mysterious. Kulvicki draws exactly this parallel: > There is no obvious consensus on what sounds or colors are. Where, in the chain of events leading to a typical experience of a sound, should we locate the sound? Can we locate it anywhere at all? These are quite general questions unsettled by the scientific progress that, at a certain level of description, is more poised for refinement than revolution. The same, unsurprisingly, can be said for color. (2017, p. [REF]) Nobody concludes from the intractability of the colour debate that we do not seem to see colours. Why should the intractability of the sound debate license any stronger conclusion about sounds? The parallel fails, because alongside the disagreement about what colours *are*, there is remarkable agreement about how colours *seem*. Chalmers describes visual phenomenology as follows: > At some level, perception represents our world as an Edenic world, populated by perfect colors and shapes, with objects and properties that are revealed to us directly (2010, p. 382). ... Phenomenologically, it seems to us as if visual experience presents simple intrinsic qualities of objects in the world, spread out over the surface of the object (p. 398). Primitivists, dispositionalists, and eliminativists about colour disagree about whether anything answers to this description, and about what could; almost nobody denies that it is the right description of how things look. The same agreement is visible in Strawson's non-philosophical observer, who, asked to describe his current visual experience, replies: "I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in groups on the vivid green grass" (1959, p. [REF]). Material objects, bearing colour properties spread across their surfaces: the seeming is common ground, and the philosophical dispute concerns its metaphysical gloss. Nothing comparable holds for sounds: here the disagreement concerns the category of the seeming itself. According to Nudds, auditory phenomenology reveals sounds as particulars, detachable from their sources: > Because sounds appear to be individuals that instantiate properties and can be individuated as such, I think it's right to say that sounds appear to be independent of the material objects that produce them—independent, that is, of their sources. (2013, p. 343) According to Leddington, auditory phenomenology reveals precisely the opposite: sounds do not appear independent of material things but are heard as "bound to, or fused with, their sources" (2014, p. 330). O'Callaghan finds temporal phenomenology decisive for the event-like character of what is heard: "Audible individuals appear to occur, to unfold, and to require time to take place" ([REF]). Kulvicki is unmoved, holding that experience is equivocal between our hearing individuals with durations and our having temporally extended experiences of individuals (2017, p. [REF]). The contrast with the colour case is now plain. Colour theorists disagree about what could make the agreed seeming veridical; sound theorists disagree about what the seeming *is* — whether sounds seem to be properties or particulars, bound or independent, thing-like or event-like. If sounds were phenomenally present in the way colours are, the debate would open the way the colour debate opens: 'sounds seem to be Fs; what, if anything, are the Fs?' It does not, because there is no agreed value for F. Two explanations of this categorial disagreement are available. The first is that some philosophers of audition are better phenomenologists than others, and one of the descriptions above is simply correct. This cannot be ruled out, but it would be very difficult to determine who has succeeded, and each party reports their description as obvious. The second is that there is no determinate seeming to describe: the conflicting reports are theoretical impositions on an experience that presents neither sound properties nor sound particulars. The second explanation accounts for the persistence and the shape of the disagreement; the first merely relabels it. Why insist that we seem to hear sounds, when there is so little agreement on how sounds seem? If this is right, sounds fail the very test that admits sources, and neither function, grouping, nor causation gives them an independent claim. What remains is the belief that we seem to hear them — a belief that can arise, as I shall now argue, without any corresponding seeming. ## 5. Sounds as Cognitive Error If we do not seem to hear sounds, why do we believe that we do? An answer can be modelled on a recent proposal concerning the phenomenology of temporal passage. Regardless of whether time actually passes, many have been attracted to the idea that it seems, experientially, to pass. Schuster, for example, holds that "the flow of time, or passage, as it is known, is given in experience, that it is as indubitable an aspect of our perception of the world as the sights and sounds that come in upon us" (1986, p. 695). Against this, Miller and colleagues have argued that the belief that we have passage experiences is a *cognitive error* ([REF]). The challenge for such a view is to explain how the false belief arises, and they offer two mechanisms, both beginning from the observation that the temporally asymmetric features of the world encourage the development of *passage-friendly language* — tenses, 'moving time' and 'moving ego' metaphors. On the first mechanism, *misdescription*, such language leads us to believe that time passes and to misdescribe our experience as being as of passage; on the second, *inferentialism*, it causes the belief that time passes, and we then infer, mistakenly, that experience is what caused the belief. Schuster treats sounds as the paradigm of the indubitably given. I suggest that he is wrong about sounds for the same kind of reason he is wrong about passage, and that the error can be explained in the same way. Two features of auditory experience make the development of *sound-friendly language* almost inevitable. The first is that auditory experiences of sources are almost always transitory: clangs, crashes, and splashes last mere moments, and it is rare to hear a source which continues indefinitely. The second is that audition never presents material objects simpliciter, but only material objects *doing* something: we hear doors slamming, creaking, scraping, and water rushing, dripping, or pouring. The things we see, by contrast, persist visibly through their episodes of activity and inactivity alike, and so a language for describing what we see needs only enduring-thing vocabulary. A language for describing what we hear needs vocabulary for brief, datable, repeatable episodes — and this is what we find: count nouns (a bang, a thud, a scrape) which are, as Casati, Di Bona and Dokic observe of ordinary sound talk, nominalisations of the verbs we use for source events (2013, p. [REF]). Language of this shape invites reification. Once we possess a stock of count nouns for auditory episodes, we come to believe that there are individuals answering to them, produced by sources and available for hearing. With sound-friendly language in place, both mechanisms transpose directly: such language leads us to misdescribe our auditory phenomenology as being as of sounds, or it causes the belief that sounds are what we hear and we infer, mistakenly, that experience is what caused the belief. On either mechanism the belief is real and its phenomenological credentials are empty — which is exactly the situation §4 described. A residual argument for sounds should be addressed here. Whatever we hear, it will be said, we hear to bear pitch, timbre, and loudness; objects and their activities do not seem like the sorts of things that could bear such properties; therefore something else — a sound — must bear them. The first premise can be granted. The second should not be. Loudness attaches naturally to events (the slam was louder than the creak), and pitch to objects and what is done to them (the small bell rings higher than the large one). Timbre, meanwhile, is not plausibly a single quality in its own right: what we call an object's timbre resolves, on inspection, into audible properties of the source and its situation — the material and size of the thing, the manner in which it is being excited, the contribution of the room or the playback device. That we can hear a guitar's tinniness *as* the smallness of a transistor radio's speaker suggests that timbre-talk is a compressed report of source properties, and if the audible qualities are qualities of how sources are heard, no sonic bearer is needed. ## 6. Objections A defender of sounds might respond by pointing to cases in which sources seem to drop out of audition altogether: if we occasionally have auditory experiences which are not of material objects, what is heard in those cases would presumably be sounds. I consider the two most pressing cases. The first is the unidentifiable source. Campbell contrasts hearing a dogfight, where "the demonstrative 'that bulldog' is an auditory demonstrative ... refer[ring] to an ordinary physical object", with hearing "a grinding noise in the street outside" where, having no idea what the source is, "you may simply refer to the noise itself" (1997, pp. 65–66). But there are innumerable situations in which we see something yet cannot identify it: one might look out of the window at night, see something lurking in the gloom, and be unable to tell what it is. Say it is a fox. Our failure to identify it does not mean we are not seeing the fox; we simply do not see it clearly enough. Even where identification fails, some properties of what is perceived are presented — the lurking thing is seen to be too small to be an elephant, and by describing what he hears as a *grinding* noise Campbell shows that he has auditory access to some of the source's properties: metallic objects moving against other objects grind; dogs, rubber balls, and raindrops do not. The second case is audio playback. Soteriou argues that recordings speak against soundless audition: "when we hear recorded sounds, the bearers of acoustic properties that we hear are pure audibilia – pure audibilia that we can hear without hearing (or misrepresenting) their 'source events'" (2018, p. 46). The tempting soundless response, that playback produces illusions of slammings and smashings, is unattractive: it would make auditory illusion rampant, and it would not explain why recordings are so obviously recordings. My response is that recordings are *auditory images*. Pictures surround us, are readily identifiable as such, and elicit non-illusory visual perceptions of absent objects; what makes picture experience distinctive is its twofoldness, in Hopkins's terms an experience "whose content somehow includes the picture's object" yet which "remains a way of seeing the picture" (1998, p. 16). Hearing a recording is likewise twofold: an experience as of the absent event, which remains a way of hearing a present material source — the loudspeaker, whose size and even material constitution are audibly manifest, just as the sheen of photographic paper is visually manifest. Playback devices are not sound-producers but a special kind of source. I develop this account elsewhere [REF]. ## Conclusion There are good reasons for wanting an account of audition on which source events are heard, and no parallel reasons for admitting sounds: of the considerations that support source hearing, only phenomenal presence could be claimed on sounds' behalf, and the radical, categorial disagreement over how sounds supposedly seem indicates that the claim is false. The belief that we seem to hear sounds is better explained as a cognitive error induced by sound-friendly language than as a report of auditory phenomenology. If this is correct, the onus now falls on those who endorse sounds to show that they are necessary. Debates about whether sounds are waves, disturbances, dispositions, or properties of events — and about whether hearing them mediates our hearing of the world — can be set aside. 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