Call for Papers / Philosophies of Sound and the Audible

PHILOSOPHIES OF SOUND AND THE AUDIBLE

Call for papers – ArteFilosofia

Edited by Igor Reyner (Unespar) and Jean-Pierre Caron (UFRJ)

 

Roberto Casati, Jérôme Dokic and Elvira Di Bona (2020) claim that what makes sound worthy of philosophical analysis is not only its centrality to the perceptual scene but also the idiosyncratic ways in which it presents itself as a philosophical subject. Reassessing sonic categories that have already been established as philosophical themes, such as noise and the sound object, recent publications, such as Cecile Malaspina’s An Epistemology of Noise (2018), the collection edited by James A. Steintranger and Rey Chow, Sound Objects (2019), Lawrence Kramer’s The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (2019), François Noudelmann’s Penser avec les oreilles (2020), and Naomi Waltham-Smith’s Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (2021), have ushered in heterogeneous new ways of thinking about sound and philosophy. In recent decades, the expansion and institutionalization of Sound Studies — that is, ‘the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival’ (Sterne, 2012) — and the introduction of the concept of sonotropism (Scherzinger, 2012), which refers to philosophy’s ‘aspiration towards the condition of music’, have revealed the potential of sound and its classical forms — the voice, music, and noise — to be treated as philosophical objects. These trends are, moreover, evidence of a widespread desire to give listening and the sonorous centre stage in theoretical inquiries.

An archaeology of this ambition might point us towards the Greek term aesthesis, whose meaning encompasses multiple dimensions of human sensibility and the senses. Depending on how it is mobilised, aesthesis can relate, among other things, to the organs of the senses, the perceptual faculties, the experience of perception, or to the perceived objects. In the philosophical context, its prevalent meaning is derived from ideas put forward by Plato and Aristotle, according to which aesthesis is ‘a particular cognition presented under an intuitive form [gnôseis]’.

Since Greek philosophy, the term has played a range of roles in association with dominant early modern Western theoretical stances, reaching its height with the coinage of the term Äesthetik by Alexander Baumgarten, in the eighteenth century. As Marc Jimenez (2004) highlights, from the nineteenth century onwards and due to its etymological ambivalence, the term aesthetics has come to relate both to ‘the delimitation of the field of knowledge bearing on art and the beautiful’, and to ‘the specialization of knowledge, methods, and objectives relative to the study of the sensible’. However, the historical process whereby aesthetics came to be institutionalised as a discipline narrowed its inherently wide scope since it has gradually become a synonym for the philosophy of art. In this process, the material dimension of the founding concept, aesthesis, was relegated to the margins of aesthetical thinking, with the polysemy of the term aesthetics remaining mainly as a historical residue.

The shaping of the discipline of philosophy of music reinforced the trajectory that aesthetics has followed towards becoming exclusively a philosophy of art. This might be the reason why there has not yet been an institutionalised equivalent, such as ‘philosophy of sound’, ‘philosophy of acoustics’, ‘philosophy of auditory parameters’, or, finally, ‘an aesthetics of the audible’.

Throughout the history of philosophy, however, sound has featured in the most significant debates, even if often marginally. Of great relevance to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, sound garnered the attention of Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Claude Perrault, Isaac Newton, and others. In the eighteenth century, Leonhard Euler attempted to define the principles of consonances as the core part of his theory of music, seeking to describe the mathematical reasons that could explain what had hitherto been understood as a sensation, creating what, for Peter Pesic (2014), is a ‘mathematical aesthetics’ that remained underexplored. Hermann von Helmholtz, who was to physiology what Euler was to mathematics, combined musical science and aesthetics with physics and acoustic physiology in innovative and paradigmatic ways into a pioneering work about our aural apparatus, sound sensation and its parameters. In the field of psychology, Christian von Ehrenfels was able to extract his main thesis, which is expressed by the notion of ‘Gestalt qualities’ [Gestaltqualitäten], from the differentiation between the phenomenological qualities of sound and music. And German romanticism, as well as phenomenology, did not come about without sharply interrogating the nature of sound and listening.

Although the last century has witnessed the proliferation of philosophical discourses on sound and listening, a discipline devoted to these topics in the mould of the philosophy of art or philosophy of music is yet to be established. The definition of a philosophy of the audible would require a widening of the aesthetical field as well as taking into account research on sound and listening undertaken over the past centuries. The breadth of this ‘new’ field would surpass, without excluding, the sonorous or sound object, noise, the voice, and primarily music, in order to encompass the auditory dimension of cross-modal perceptions, incorporating not only philosophy of perception but also politics and ethics.

With a view to contributing to instituting a philosophy of sound and the audible, we invite contributions related but not restricted to one of the topics:

 

. Sound in the long seventeenth century

. Resonance and enlightenment

. Metaphysics of listening and German romanticism

. Acoustic physiology and aesthetics

. Philosophy of perception and analytical philosophy: proximal, medial and distal theories of sound

. The acoustic unconscious

. Sound objects

. The listening subject

. Acousmatics as a philosophical field

. The audible

. Thinking through the ears

. Listening and deconstruction

. Sound, listening and biopolitics

. Philosophy of noise and ontology of noise

. Sound and cross-sensorial modality

. Sonic virtuality, sonic aggregate, and emerging perception

. Sound as information and digital data