The Singularity of Sound

Streetlight

I wonder how things would have turned out if, instead of modelling our metaphysics on vision - appearance/reality, subject/object - sound or aurality were to instead be taken as a model for approaching the world. The most immediate difference is that to hear a sound is always to hear a difference: a change in air pressure over time. That is, time is always implicated in the perception of a sound: there can be no zero-dimensional ‘slice’ of sound that would not at the same time destroy that sound as a sound. Moreover, more than just wavelength (which determines if the sound is high pitched or low pitched), sound also has an ‘in-built’ dimension of amplitude, or loudness. Like pitch, loudness is also a periodic value: it too is a measure of change. Without at least these two extended dimensions, one would do away with sound altogether. Naively of course, vision excludes this ‘in-built’ dimension of difference: to see is to see self-identical ’things’ (this is not quite right, but let’s run with it for now…)

Sound then, is resolutely anti-Platonic, to the degree that it militates against any notion of timelessness, eternity, or ’the unchanging’. One cannot so much contemplate the eternal Idea of sound (recalling that Plato’s Ideai means ‘the visible’) than have to actively listen to a sound ‘in real time’. Hence, for example, the famous Platonic aversion towards the flute (and conversely, Nietzsche’s championing of the Dionysian powers of flute playing!). Sound always belongs to the sphere of becoming, rather than that of Being (consider Adriana Cavarero: "While [Plato] condemns the flute, or the acoustic sphere in general ... [He nonetheless] asks the power of Dionysus—the god of dispossessing ecstasy—for a contemplative ecstasy. For Plato, what is needed is to flay Socratic flute playing, to tear off its sonorous shell, in order to go inside—where the nous, the eye of the soul, shows itself as the true protagonist of this enchantment. Immobile and perfect, the metaphysical dream is static and ecstatic.” (Cavarero, For More Than One Voice).

Another metaphysically salient aspect of sound is it’s indirectness. Sound always ‘comes from elsewhere’. That is, unlike the visible, which (again, naively) must always present-to-sight, sound can be heard around corners, through speakers, ‘out of sight’, without, importantly, compromising it’s so-called 'authenticity’. Aden Evens point this out in his wonderful book on sound (the inspiration for this thread): "Since we are all used to listening to what is not there, we are hardly troubled by the ontological problems of recording and playback. We refer to what we hear as “the flügelhorn” whether it is Clark Terry before us or just a CD of his playing … Sight, on the other hand, is a matter of looking at something that is evidently there. Were it not there, we wouldn’t be able to see it or, rather, look at it. To see is to be in the presence of the object under regard…. But to play a recording on a stereo is considered an authentic listening experience, not just a document of something that happened previously. In either case, one hears the sound of the flügelhorn, which does not seem to require the presence of an actual flügelhorn.” (Evens, Sound Ideas).

In other words, sound also militates against the appearance/reality divide which characterizes so much of Western metaphysics (although it is not totally immune to it: the authenticity of sound can be said to be organised along a different axis today: digital vs. analog, although importantly (very importantly!), such a division is ‘internal’ to sound, and not external to it). While I’ve been giving vision a bit of a bad rap, it’s important to note that I’ve been simplifying a bit too; in truth, to perceive visually is also to perceive in terms of difference (figure/background), and where, importantly, movement is absolutely central to the experience of sight. Nonetheless, given that these characteristics are more intuitively obvious at the level of sound, it is useful, I think, to consider what a metaphysics modelled upon sound might offer (touch has often been touted as a better metaphysical model than vision - by Merleau-Ponty, Alva Noe, and Hans Jonas for example - but not much consideration is often granted to sound).

(There are also important questions regarding how the perception of rhythm is crucially implicated in it's entrainment with the rhythms that compose our bodies - and a larger discussion of embodiment more generally - but perhaps these can be brought out in the course of discussion).

Saphsin

This is interesting, but I find something off about analyzing the metaphysics of hearing as an act of perception based on the properties of sound waves (the medium that provides information for perception) rather than the objects of perception (if there are such objects to be said, I'll have to think about this) when you do not for vision with respect to electro-magnetic waves. How do you justify this difference?

Michael

That is, unlike the visible, which (again, naively) must always present-to-sight, sound can be heard around corners, through speakers, ‘out of sight’, without, importantly, compromising it’s so-called 'authenticity’. — StreetlightX

This strikes me as a problematic evaluation. Obviously we might say that the visible must be present-to-sight, but so too might we say that the audible must be present-to-hearing. I can also turn this around and say that the visible can be out of earshot without compromising its authenticity.

And with respect to hearing something through speakers; how is that different to seeing something through a television? This likely ties in with @Saphsin's query.

Streetlight

This is interesting, but I find something off about analyzing the metaphysics of hearing as an act of perception based on the properties of sound waves (the medium that provides information for perception) rather than the objects of perception (if there are such objects to be said, I'll have to think about this) when you do not for vision with respect to electro-magnetic waves. How do you justify this difference? — Saphsin

Perhaps - and again, I'm working in an exploratory mode here - the precise advantage in thinking in terms of sound is exactly this inseparability of medium and content. Once you begin to explore the psychoacoustics of sound, this becomes all the more palpable I think: the specific timbre or 'quality' of sound (whether from a French horn or a violin) is shaped by a variety of factors including the exact shape of the wave (which may be jagged, smooth - in any case always distinct depending on the source of the sound); the harmonics of the note played as it is amplified or cancelled out by other vibrations (which may be from the instrument itself or from the room it is played it), the exact manner in which the note is played, etc. There's a kind of materiality or corporeality to thinking in terms of sound which makes it always-already 'environmental' and not 'detached', as with vision.

We don't hear a 'thing out there' (as with sight); so much as we are implicated in the sound itself; we - or our ear drums and cochlea - vibrate along with the sound, such that we - as bodies - are enfolded into the very phenomenon of sound without which we would not be able to 'hear' it. Hearing is not the passive imprint of sound upon a docile body, but a kind of activity. Evens speaks of sound as a 'compression' or contraction effected by the body: "What hearing contributes to sound, therefore, is a contraction. Hearing takes a series of compressions and rarefactions and contracts them, hears them as a single quality, a sound. Or, rather, hearing contracts this wave of compression and rarefaction into a number of qualities that together determine a singular sound".

In this, hearing is active: "the temporalities of sound are things that we do, extraordinary powers of perception and the perceptive body. The body must compress time, it draws into a singular moment an interval of difference ... To feel a rhythm means to feel the entirety of a beat all at once, even while anticipating the next beat. The space between one beat and the next is not itself a metrical or metered interval; to the listener, performer, conductor, and composer, it is rather a pulse, a moment that does not lose its integrity when divided. Once entrained, the perceptive body can hear the rhythm even when it is not being played." Again, this seems to me to be an interesting resource when it comes to thinking about our metaphysics, which traditionally sets subject against object, separating medium and content, abstract and concrete. Sound scrambles things in very nice ways.

Streetlight

This strikes me as a problematic evaluation. Obviously we might say that the visible must be present-to-sight, but so too might we say that the audible must be present-to-hearing. I can also turn this around and say that the visible can be out of earshot without compromising its authenticity.

And with respect to hearing something through speakers; how is that different to seeing something through a television? This likely ties in with Saphsin's query. — Michael

Perhaps the point is better specified in terms of representation than spatio-temporal orientation: the visual tends to be thought of as either ‘the thing itself’ or as a copy or representation of the thing itself. But aurality tends to scramble this division - we don’t tend to think of, say, a song on an iPod as a ‘representation’ of the thing itself: the recorded song just is the thing itself (we enjoy the recording as a recording, it’s not a degraded representation of the real thing; the tune, melody and rhythm of this song, playing now, in my ears, is the experience of the thing itself). And seeing the song played live, is, I think, generally taken to be an experience of a qualitatively different order.

Again, this is of course not a distinction set in stone: art, and especially the photographic arts, tend to challenge this model, presenting the picture or the painting as something complete-unto-itself, something to be savoured on it’s own terms. In this sense art always tends to emphasise immanence over transcendence, drawing attention to itself as art - photorealism perhaps even more so than anything else (note the the first reaction to a good photo-realistic painting or drawing is to usually express amazement at how real it looks: what better to confirm it’s ‘irreal’ status? - reality itself would of course be met with indifference).

Sound on the other hand doesn't tend to need to draw attention to itself as art in order to assert it's authenticity; even a degraded recording of someone speaking - so long as more or less audible - isn't generally thought of as 'not the real words of the speaker'. It doesn't necessarily put into question what is being heard - whereas a bad, blurry photograph but put into question the very reality of what is being seen. Again, these distinctions are very much a matter of emphasis and tendency, than anything categorical and immutable. They function better as provocations to thinking differently than as 'the right way to think'.

Moliere

Three things immediately come to mind, one of which you've already alluded to with "figure/background". Sound may be "around a corner", but sound is also "everywhere". We can locate a sound's location in space, but space itself is already a visual notion. When we hear something it melds entirely . That isn't to say you can't have a melody and a harmony, or the ability to pick out particular instruments in a symphony (though these would be more akin to looking at a painting than just the experience of sound), but I think that particularity would be less central to metaphysics -- so generalizing from some particular visual cue to a universal wouldn't be quite as an important of a question -- "cutting across appearance/reality" as you note.

But then, because sound is experienced differently from vision, I'd say we would also speak about both vision and sound differently (since I believe our metaphysical beliefs are what form a foundation for rational and lingustic analysis). So we wouldn't talk about the wave-form of a sound, for instance. This is a very visual metaphor for sound. In fact, we may not even care about writing and the document -- these wouldn't be seen as sources of truth or memory. I don't know exactly what that world would look like, though, after being shared and people desiring to build institutions.

Third: It seems to me that "the self" is a curiosity because it is an entity which is always present, unlike other entities. It alone has the phenemonological quality, in a vision-centric context of belief, of being "everywhere". But this would be less curious if sound predominated metaphysical thinking.

It's a really interesting question though!

Saphsin

↪StreetlightX

I would say that I do agree with you that much of how we characterize the nature of what we hear is on the differences of the vibrations, and thus there is a justification for examining the properties of sound waves to look for insight. This seems to be less so for how we examine the relation of light with respect to vision because we are only able to take advantage of a very narrow spectrum and it's the nature of light for some of its properties to remain consistent (such as speed) though it is not true when we examine the qualities of color & brightness, to which it is impossible for there to be an "inseparability of medium and content" (for instance, if we are to examine the nature of perception of flashing colors in empty space instead of perception of objects)

I think the difference in discourse between the examination of hearing and that of vision is different because much of the latter focuses on qualities that describe the contours of objects of perception while we have much less of that for sound (we do have some of that, such as the focus of how something sounds differently if an object is hard or soft upon collision with another object)

So perhaps an effective metaphysics of perception differs based on what aspect you are focusing on, such as a focus on how the medium affects the experience of perception (brightness and shades of flashing colors/loudness) in contrast to how it reveals the attributes of objects (appearance of objects/hardness of objects) So I'm suspicious of using what you described as a justification for using properties of sound waves as the basis for metaphysics of hearing, unless we are to do the same for vision in respect to its medium. I'm not really sure how much the ontology of waves actually reveals about the nature of its coinciding experiences.

Streetlight

Three things immediately come to mind, one of which you've already alluded to with "figure/background". Sound may be "around a corner", but sound is also "everywhere". We can locate a sound's location in space, but space itself is already a visual notion. When we hear something it melds entirely . That isn't to say you can't have a melody and a harmony, or the ability to pick out particular instruments in a symphony (though these would be more akin to looking at a painting than just the experience of sound), but I think that particularity would be less central to metaphysics -- so generalizing from some particular visual cue to a universal wouldn't be quite as an important of a question -- "cutting across appearance/reality" as you note. — Moliere

Yeah absolutely - there's definitely a kind of cosmic, a-centered element to sound that doesn't jibe quite as well with the visual; even the language we use for sound is far broader and 'baggier': there is a line or a ray of sight and vision, but a direction of sound - these expressions also locate agency in a slightly different way; the line of sight belongs to 'us', whereas the direction of the sound belongs to it's source. There's an asymmetry to how we think about these things.

Moreover sound tends to be more readily recognized as indifferent to either humans or even the living: we 'pick up' sounds to the degree that we are in range of it's vibrations, but then, strictly speaking, so does anything else, which, if sized correctly (as per the wands of an antenna), will vibrate along with the sound even if it doesn't have the phenomenological experience of 'hearing' the sound as a quality. Sound tends not to be 'for-us', even though we 'participate' in it's being. The visual, on the other hand, always seems directed to the eye; the visual world emanates about us, where the aural world is one we enter into (this plays into your point about 'the self' as being less privileged when thinking in terms of sound).

Streetlight

So perhaps an effective metaphysics of perception differs based on what aspect you are focusing on, such as a focus on how the medium affects the experience of perception (brightness and shades of flashing colors/loudness) in contrast to how it reveals the attributes of objects (appearance of objects/hardness of objects) So I'm suspicious of using what you described as a justification for using properties of sound waves as the basis for metaphysics of hearing, unless we are to do the same for vision in respect to its medium. I'm not really sure how much the ontology of waves actually reveals about the nature of its coinciding experiences. — Saphsin

I guess I'm not so concerned about a 'metaphysics of hearing' so much as what the experience of hearing can offer a metaphysics: a different focus, as you say (already a visual metaphor!), or an emphasis on a different mode of thinking. With sound as a basis, would or could one think in terms of subject and property, for instance? Is a sound anything other than it's properties, the so-called accidents that 'befall' 'it'? Could one be an Aristotelian if one were born blind? Or a Hegelian? A - God forbid - analytic metaphysician? I suspect not.

Saphsin

↪StreetlightX

Sure, but I'm not sure if we can really separate "how the examination of hearing serves a basis for a new metaphysics" without it being based first on an effective metaphysics of hearing.

Metaphysician Undercover

To think of sound without either wavelength or amplitude would be to do away with sound altogether. Naively of course, vision excludes this ‘in-built’ dimension of difference: to see is to see self-identical ’things’ (this is not quite right, but let’s run with it for now…) — StreetlightX

I would not be so quick to focus on the difference between hearing and seeing. What we see are differences of colour, and these are wavelength/frequency differences, just like the differences which we hear. We do not see "self-identical things", we learn to identify things through the power of thought, not sight. We can identify the same note when it comes around in a piece of music, just like we can identify the same colour in different things.

Through this power of identification, we can also recognize that hearing and seeing are actually very similar. It's simply the case that the speed of sound is much slower than the speed of light, so we understand the mechanism of hearing much better than the mechanism of seeing. Did you know that the spectrum of visible wavelength of electromagnetism is almost precisely one "octave"?

Metaphysician Undercover

We don't hear a 'thing out there' (as with sight); so much as we are implicated in the sound itself; we - or our ear drums and cochlea - vibrate along with the sound, such that we - as bodies - are enfolded into the very phenomenon of sound without which we would not be able to 'hear' it. — StreetlightX

We do hear a "thing out there", just like we see things. We hear the thing which makes the noise, the French horn, the violin, the dog barking, we always hear a thing, making a sound. Yes, it requires identification to determine that the sound is coming from a French horn, but whenever we hear a disembodied "sound", we are merely confused with "what's that?". Nevertheless, we always assume that the noise comes from something. It is not believed that the noise is "out there" without a thing causing it. This is no different from seeing. We can see a colour, and if we can't identify the object we think "what's that?". But we know that the colour which is being seen is coming from the object, as a property of the object, just like we know that the sound is coming from the French horn, as a property of the French horn

Cavacava

↪StreetlightX

Sound then, is resolutely anti-Platonic, to the degree that it militates against any notion of timelessness, eternity, or ’the unchanging’.

Socrates only spoke, his method of conveyance of his thought was sound, dialogue.

Not certain why he dismissed the flutes, but perhaps because they (similar to the Athenian conception of women) were thought to be structurally disproportionate, unlike a lute. Plato's works are all about harmony & rhythm and beauty.

Streetlight

↪Cavacava

This is true, but if one pays attention to the specifics of what Plato actually says and does with sound, what he consistently attempts to do is extract the logoi from the phone: he values the acoustic to the extent - and only to the extent - that it conforms the ideals of harmony and ideality. It's to this degree that Plato is a consummate heir of Pythagoras, who as the story goes, drowned his own student Hippasus for his discovery of irrational numbers. And like Pythagoras, Plato consistently attempts to cleanse the acoustic sphere of it's specifically sonorous, libidinal charge, in favour of it's noetic, idealizing, and discursive form. Cavarero's entire For More Than One voice details, almost dialogue by dialogue, each of the places where Plato goes about 'devocalizing' the voice in favour of the noetic. But with respect to the flute, consider:

"Alcibiades tells the story of Marsyas, the arrogant satyr who is the protagonist of a cruel myth. Marsyas was a champion of the art of the flute, who challenged Apollo and his cithara [lute]. Marsyas was convinced that the flute produced an irresistible and extremely sweet melody that was superior to that of string instruments. But he was wrong. The myth in fact tells us that Apollo won the competition, and as punishment, Marsyas was flayed alive. His skin was torn off while his mouth, no longer intent on blowing into the flute, emitted tremendous cries of pain. Thus Marsyas learned, at great expense, that one should not challenge the gods. But he also learned that the wind instruments are a prolongation of the mouth and that they are too similar to the voice. Besides the fact that they swell the cheeks and deform the face, they require breath and thus impede the flutist from speaking. In other words, the flute lets itself, dangerously, represent the phone in the double sense of the term: voice and sound.

Whoever plays it renounces speech and evokes a world in which the acoustic sphere and expressions of corporeality predominate. It is the world of the Dionysian dithyramb, where the flute modulates rhythms that accompany an orgiastic dance. Nothing is further from the videocentric comportment of the philosophical logos. ... Underneath Socratic speech — the very sonorous, audible speech that comes out of his mouth — there is a devocalized logos whose reality is truer, more originary, and thus, more divine. ... This order, as the harmonious, right joining of ideas that are grasped by a simultaneous vision, in fact corresponds to the logos that is the dream [in which] there are no more flutes, nor voices, nor sounds; only a perfect noetic ecstasy."

Cavarero goes on to show how this anti-acoustic current is of a piece with Plato's dislike of Homer and poetry more generally, as well as accounting for his portrayal of woman like the Muses and the Sirens (the link between women and the acoustic is not incidental but perfectly considered): "The epic worries Plato above all for its musical and vocal performance, linked to corporeal pleasure. The harmonious voices of the Muses and Sirens, and the monotonous and penetrating song of the cicadas, continue to disturb the platonic imaginary whenever the philosopher seeks to critique the poets. The principal function of these figures — who re emblematically feminine — seems to be to emphasize the sonorous, libidinal, and presemantic materiality of logos. What is certain is that in this contagious pleasure, the acoustic register... stands in opposition to the solitary style of theoria. This pleasure alludes to harmonious links that are different from those of the philosopher’s logos; it alludes to a closer relation, at times too close, with the female body."

Mongrel

Sound then, is resolutely anti-Platonic, to the degree that it militates against any notion of timelessness, eternity, or ’the unchanging’ — StreetlightX

Fascinating topic. I grew up with a cousin who has perfect pitch. I was telling her once that music always seem to be beyond my grasp, always disappearing. She answered, "No, it's always there."

Always where? In a psychic landscape? Maybe Beethoven, the deaf composer would agree. Science says that tinnitus (a ringing in the ears) is generated entirely by the brain (ears have nothing to do with it). So it may be that if we were more audio-oriented, we'd arrive at direct realism anyway.

Especially if you do a lot of drawing and painting, you might become accustomed to seeing just pure color, shading, and lines. You can see without any consideration of what (the Platonic) by a simple act of will. If humans didn't have eyes, maybe we would say that in regard to sound.

Eyes have independently evolved more than 50 times on planet earth, though.

Numi Who

↪StreetlightX

\
IN THE END BOTH METAPHYSICS ARE MAKE-BELIEVE
At best, both metaphysics, as sheer speculations (if pure imaginative make-believe or if based on data), offer 'possibilities' that may or may not rate further investigation.

That said, the make-believe and/or speculations will be different, reflecting the particular senses that they were based on. In the case of sound, all explanations would be cast in 'pressure waves'.

As far as 'divining reality' from sheer speculation, you can test it in the physical world. If it is beyond testing, then it is something to keep in mind as a possibility - especially when 'peering into the unknown' as I like to phrase it (though with hearing, your 'peering' would be 'listening' for the unknown - and all technology would be designed around hearing. Note that 'hearing' will do you no good as far as discovering threats from the vacuum of space - for example in the case of an impending killer asteroid, you would not know it until you heard it - meaning it had already entered the earth's atmosphere, which gives you only a split-second to react, which would be too late for your survival...

and this leads us to a key issue with 'senses' - it would be wise to always search for 'new senses' (and we have gained many through science and technology - in just a few hundred years we have gained senses (and physical/mental abilities) far beyond what mere biology has given us over the past several billion years).

So, being stimulated to think further along a parallel path, the two major questions are 1.) What new 'sense' will be discovered next? and, (far more important) 2.) What senses do we still need to secure higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe?

The Singularity of Sound

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