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The Thingness of Sound

Abstract

The possibility that sounds might be objects, entities, or things is an open question. However, many theories of sound close the question down via reductive assertions.

Some argue that sounds cannot be things because things are autonomous entities

whereas sounds are relative. Others argue that sounds cannot be things because

things are durable bodies whereas sounds are temporal phenomena. The following

essay begins by reviewing and critiquing these arguments as they appear in

musicology, sound studies, and philosophy. Arguments against sounds autonomy are

generally motivated by anthropocentric ideologies, which by presuming humans

ontological privilege reduce sounds to human experiences, practices, and conditions.

Meanwhile, arguments against sounds durability are troubled by the Sorites paradox.

The trouble with these arguments is that they dissimulate sounds absolute otherness

and lasting impact; moreover, in the end they can neither disprove nor affirm sounds

object-potential. In an attempt to rehabilitate the question of sounds thingness, the second half of my discussion proposes an object-oriented ontology for sound. Developed by Graham Harman, object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers an open-ended conception of thingness as a continuous metabolism of temporal relationality and

durable autonomy. In OOO, things are paradoxical: every entity consists of a

necessary, hidden essence and contingent presence, separated by an irreconcilable

ontological rift. Consequently, things are irreducible to their relations even as they are

their relations. As things in the object-oriented sense, sounds would retain their potent

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and absolute otherness while losing none of the experiential relativity thats crucial to

aesthetic theories. Further, the withdrawn ambiguity of entities in OOO ensures that

ontology remains an open question. In fact, the difficulty involved in either committing

or objecting to sounds thingness demonstrates that sound calls the ontology of objects into question. Sounds make questions out of thingness and things.

Keywords

sound object, object-oriented ontology, Graham Harman, anthropocentrism

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Is a sound a thing?

To doubt the productivity of this question is only reasonable. Neither

philosophy nor empirical science can prove or disprove sounds thing-status.

One would be justified in wondering if the matter isnt an ontological conundrum but a semantic quibble based on the vagueness of the terms. But the meaning of

the word thing hinges on how real things actually are, not just on what people think they mean when they speak about things. Words are real relationships

between humans and other beings, and these relationships have real, sometimes

dangerous effects.

Its standard in certain practices to treat sounds as things. Electroacoustic

composers such as Chris Cutler, Curtis Roads, and Steve Takasugi use terms

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like sound object, sound particle, or sound specimen to describe sounds, samples, and musical phrases that function as relatively stable, self-contained

units. Sound artists explore and interrogate the tactile materiality of their

medium. Toshiya Tsunoda, for example, treats field recordings as found objects that, isolated from the context in which the artist captured them, acquire a certain

autonomy.1 In contrast, the pop-music industry sells, steals, and squabbles over

sonic units as commodities, mythologically assimilating intellectual property to

other forms of property like cars and houses.2 Scholars since Adorno have

fearfully predicted the commodity forms suppression of artists creativity,

listeners individuality, and musics communicative ability.3

Shrewd recognition of sounds object-qualities its durability, autonomy, salability, and physicality also underlies its evermore frequent deployment as a

weapon. American forces in the Middle East and Guantnamo regularly use loud

music as a kind of aerial bomb, siege weapon, or torture instrument, and unleash

sonic cannons upon peaceful protesters like those of the Occupy movement.

Sound-cannon manufacturers explicitly compare sounds to rubber bullets,

suggesting that the former may substitute for the latter in efforts to comply with

inconvenient legislation against shooting people.4 This fungibility implies that

because sounds and bullets impact human bodies with equivalent force, sounds

1 Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise (New York: Oxford University Press), 125.

2 Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham: Duke University Press), 191.

3 Theodor Adorno, On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, In Essays on Music, trans. R.

Leppert, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 288-317. 4 LRAD Corporation, LRAD for Public Safety Applications Fact Sheet. Accessed 23 July 2014.

http://www.lradx.com/site/content/view/323

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and bullets are the same kind of entity: those who make and buy sound cannons

use, understand, and advertise sounds as self-contained, tangible objects durable enough to permanently damage human flesh.

But the manufacturers seem to anticipate that the harmful aspects of their

products would not escape those (thoughtful TV viewers and liberal Congresspersons) who take the conception of sound-as-thing to its logical conclusion.5 To preempt humanitarian criticism, then, the manufacturers

downplay the autonomous physicality of sound, emphasizing instead its

intangible, communicative qualities. The idea is to dissimulate the cannons

cruelty and allow it to masquerade as a harmless mass-communication device.

This tactic takes advantage of prevailing ideologies that tout the fleeting

intangibility and relativity of sound, and discourage or decry its thing-power: its

physical impact and otherness.

Its all too easy to perpetuate ideologies of transience and relativity by

insisting that sounds are not objects but experiences or practices. Discourses that abjure the thingness of sound tend to close themselves off to alternate views, foreclosing the possibility of further questioning by reducing sound to

relativistic origins that are too subjective to contest. Temporality and relationality are integral aspects of the being of sound, but they do not tell the whole story.

Anthropocentrism desensitizes theorists to the other aspects of sound which are

irreducible to human experiences and circumstances. 5 LRAD Corporation, The Global Leader in Long Range Acoustic Hailing Devices: Public Safety. Accessed 23 July

2014. http://www.lradx.com/site/content/view/254/110

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Humanistic objections to sounds thingness generally draw upon an apparent incompatibility between what the objectors take to be the defining qualities of things and the defining qualities of sound: things are durable and

autonomous, sounds are transient and relative. The relativism of most sonic

theories is of a peculiarly anthropocentric kind that presumes the ontological

priority of human beings or human social structures, as if sounds could not exist

without us. This assumption is inaccurate. Discourses built upon concomitant

theories therefore cannot effectively critique acoustic weaponry, musical torture,

and other forms of sonic abuse because those practices subscribe to the same

ideologies, denying sounds autonomous, lasting impact in the interests of

humanistic dissemblance.

In 1 of my discussion, Ill critique sound scholars objections to the autonomy entailed by sonic thingness, arguing that such objections issue from anthropocentric ideologies. As Ill cover in 2, the apparent incompatibility between things and sounds derives from a reductive understanding of sounds

and things in terms of durability. Given that sounds potential object-status cannot be disproved on the basis of sounds transience or its relationships with

humans, I will reconsider sonic thingness as a serious possibility in 3. What are sounds and what are things, if sounds can be things? I will propose an object-oriented ontology for sound based on Graham Harmans pioneering work, which

reveals things to be stranger and more potent than humans want to believe. As

OOO foregrounds the hiddenness and paradoxicality of things, maintaining their

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autonomy and durability without sacrificing their relationality or temporality, this

ambiguous metaphysics demands that humans give up the mistaken

presumption that we were ever ontologys star players, and recognize the potent

otherness of sound. OOO seems to advocate the de-anthropocentric tenets of

radical ecology: humans neither possess nor are entitled to mastery over

nonhumans; so nonhumans, including sounds, exist for themselves, not for us or

because of us. These precepts might be more desirable than anthropocentrism,

especially at this moment in our planets history, but decisions for or against

sonic thingness on the basis of any ideology are precisely what I set out to

oppose. Fortunately, as I conclude in 4, OOO forces the objectness of sound to remain an open question which itself calls things and relations into question.

Before delving into the argument proper, I would like to clarify my use of

sources and terms. This essay is about sound, not specifically about music,

though it was in musicology that I first encountered the question of sounds

thingness. My interdisciplinary inquiry therefore addresses musicology as well as

sound studies. I draw on both analytic and continental philosophies, taking no

part in their conflict, only seeking their responses to the questions at hand.

Although my discussion of OOO occurs largely in 3, I introduce Harmans tenets in preceding sections where relevant. I consider all sounds to be ontologically

equivalent regardless of their source, duration, loudness, or assigned cultural

value. And I use the terms thing, object, and entity interchangeably throughout. This usage conforms to Harmans but diverges from

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phenomenological usage such as that of Heidegger, who distinguishes between

objects and things.

1 Against Autonomy

In musicology and sound studies, arguments against the possibility of

sounds thingness are common. A popular contention is that things are self-

contained whereas sounds are contingent on what people do. For proponents of

this view, distinguishing between human perceptions or practices and the sounds

involved therein requires several undesirable moves, e.g.: misrepresenting the

fundamentally human activity that is music;6 ignoring deconstruction, the

linguistic turn and other philosophical trends;7 and submitting to undesirable

ideologies.

For example, Rodgers claims that any conception of sounds as

differentiated individuals is actually a metaphor based on capitalist, individualist,

and scientific ideologies that render human subjects classifiable and quantifiable.8 Since the nineteenth century, she argues, sounds have been

understood analogously to human bodies. Scientists and philosophers began to

treat sounds as autonomous entities when the dissection of human bodies into

autonomous components, classification of humanity as an autonomous species,

6 Christopher Small, Musicking (Middletown: Wesleyan, 1998), 8.

7 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear (London: Continuum, 2009), 13.

8 Tara Rodgers, What, for me, constitutes life in a sound?: Electronic Sounds as Lively and Differentiated

Individuals, American Quarterly 63(3): 510-511.

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and discrimination between members of autonomous genders and ethnic groups

became customary, all in the name of fantasies of control.9 For Rodgers, sonic

autonomy is a reifying metaphor that perpetuates the desire for biopower and the

reductive categorizations that result in racism and chauvinism.

In contrast, the idea that sound is ontologically indistinguishable from

human perceivers dates back to the beginning of modernity. According to

Erlmanns rich historical analysis, an analogy between sound-perception and

reasoning, both of which were understood as forms of sympathetic resonance,

dominated philosophical and scientific theories from Descartes time to Adornos.

The analogy became so prevalent that by the nineteenth century it was no longer

an analogy but a physical confluence: sound could not exist unless someone

human heard it. Sound, hearing, and hearer became one and the same. [W]e

ourselves are the string that, set into motion, perceives its own sound from inside

to outside, perceives itselfas if one were this tone oneself; its essence and our

own are one, said Ritter in 1806.10 Thus we are ontologically prior to any sound.

In listening, we make sounds what they are: as Helmholtz claimed, aerial

vibrations do not become sound until they fall upon a hearing ear.11 Erlmann

identifies this solipsistic, anthropo- and ego-centric perspective with

hypochondria: an amplification of not just ones sense of bodily malfunctioning,

9 Ibid., 512.

10 Johannes Ritter quoted in Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance (Cambridge: Zone, 2010): 198-9.

11 Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music. Science and Culture: Popular and

Philosophical Essays, ed. D. Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46-75

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but of a persons sensory sphere more generally and of everything else along

with it: meaning, subjectivity, language, and thought.12 Regarding the conflation of sound and hearing, Erlmanns concern isnt

sounds loss of autonomy the others loss of otherness, which I hope to

foreground here but our own. Depriving sounds of their autonomy means

depriving us of ours: the more that the boundaries of the object world appear to dissolvethe more [ones] own self loses its substance.13 That said, restoring

sounds autonomy admitting their self-contained existence by acknowledging

that what one hears isnt just oneself shuddering in an empty world does not restore the freedom of the human subject. Rather, self-contained sounds are authoritarian and oppressive in Erlmanns analysis. He therefore disapproves of

music that seems to achieve autonomy from its perceivers or total object status. In such music, the attendant concept of a for someone or audience have all but

vanished. Existing only for itself, such music is inhuman in the cruel sense of

totalitarianism, Erlmann writes. If a listener cannot hear (or impose) echoes of herself in what she hears, Listening becomes Gehorchen, an act of

obedience.14

What Erlmann calls obedience Harman calls sincerity. In OOO, every

object essentially exists for itself, not for someone, i.e. not for the sake of or because of any human requirement or presence; but from the object-oriented

12 Erlmann, Reason, 210.

13 Ibid., 211.

14 Ibid., 332

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perspective, this state of affairs is nothing like totalitarianism. To practice OOO is

indeed to expose ourselves to the autonomous otherness of objects. Doing ontology means mak[ing] oneself ever more vulnerable to nonhuman things.15

It entails radical openness to other beings, without goal.16 From this

perspective, listening doesnt mean listening for oneself but coming into contact

with sonic entities that are irreducible to oneself. However, such vulnerability

need not entail the destruction of our freedom or curtail our own influence upon

what we hear. As Harman suggests (3), a thing is one thing for itself and another thing for each of us. What does hint at authoritarianism is the notion that

nonhuman autonomy is morally objectionable. So does the related notion that sounds or any other nonhumans ought to be for someone (cf. Sterne). If one objects to the idea of sonic thingness on the assumption that things are autonomous and sounds shouldnt be, the objection is susceptible to charges of xenophobic utilitarianism.

A related problem pervades Kanes incisive critique of what Pierre

Schaeffer, the inventor of sampling and musique concrte, called lobjet sonore. Inspired by Husserls phenomenological reduction, Schaeffer claimed that if one

ignores a sounds references to the world beyond itself forgetting its

implications of a source, ignoring its semantic and communicative potential one

will hear the sound in itself. This in-itself or essence of sound is a sound

object: a sound that no longer functions for-another as a medium but rather 15

Graham Harman, Tool-Being (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 226. 16

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 164.

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designate[s] something discrete and complete.17 Schaeffer hoped that such

bare sounds might function as basic ontological unit[s] that provide common

ground between musical and acoustic research.18 He attempted to guide

listeners towards sound objects by using recording equipment to separate sounds from their original causal sources. Ultimately, though, the reduction is an

act of consciousness: one simply excludes referential possibilities from ones

attention. Whats left is not the sound that enters ones ears from outside but the

content of ones own, deliberately restricted perception. A sound object is the fruit of a mode of considering or listening to the fragment torn from the whole.19

It only comes into being when it is cognized, when it is something capable of

being apprehended by a subject.20 Here again, sound object and sound perception are one and the same. A sound object amounts to the subjective decision to hear in a certain way, perhaps analogous to the designation of a

class, type, or category.21

What Kane objects to in Schaeffers work is the ignorance of subjective difference and sociohistorical context that listening to sound objects entails. If a sound possessed the discrete, stable in-itself that Schaeffer unsuccessfully

proposed, then every listener who heard it would essentially hear the same thing;

the difference between listening experiences would be moot.22 For Kane,

17 Brian Kane, Sound Unseen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25, 16.

18 Ibid., 36.

19 Ibid., 16.

20 Ibid., 19.

21 Ibid., 34.

22 Brian Kane, The Music of Skepticism, PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2006, 131.

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however, sounds are precisely the unique, temporally situated, sociohistorically

determined situations of those who hear them. Sounds do not simply constitute

a realm of essence detachable from their moment, sites of production, or

reception. Rather, they need to be recognized as a sedimentation of historical

and social forces.23 From this perspective the idea of sonic autonomy is nothing

but hardheaded idealism.24

According to Kane, Schaeffer contracted his idealism from Heidegger, who

understood technology as something separate from its sociohistorical context.25

Harman agrees with Heidegger on this point, though Harman is no idealist but a

broad-minded realist. As Ill discuss (3), in OOO things do exist independently of human concerns, actions, and social structures; in fact being an object means being autonomous, irreducibly other, permanently uncanny. But for Kane, that

autonomy makes sound objects untenable. Music consists of historically specific persons involved in artistic or critical engagements with the technological

means at hand, he says, suggesting that sonic ontologies should proceed from

the same perspective.26 Sonic discourse must resist the reliance upon

ahistorical ontologies, he contends.27 The implication is that when discourse

eliminates sociohistorical context and subjective difference, e.g. by positing the thingly autonomy of sound, music is reduced to phantasmagoria: a product that

23 Kane, Unseen, 53.

24 Ibid., 36.

25 Brian Kane, Lobjet sonore maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction,

Organised Sound 12(1): 22. 26

Kane, Unseen, 40. 27

Kane, Lobjet, 22.

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disguises its human origins in order to appear self-sufficient and that smacks of

ideology.28

But so does Kanes assertion that sounds are simply a sedimentation of

historical and social forces. Like Erlmanns, this analysis is phantasmagorical in

the opposite sense: it conceals the self-contained, nonhuman otherness of sound

so that sound may appear ontologically dependent on human productive forces.

As Cox notes, this kind of analysis falls prey to a provincial and chauvinistic

anthropocentrism...for it treats human symbolic interaction as a unique and

privileged endowment, perpetuating the falsehood that human beings inhabit a

privileged ontological position.29

In that sense, despite Kanes disagreement with Schaeffer, the two

theorists make the same reduction on different scales. Schaeffers guileless use

of recordings to divorce sounds from their instrumental sources deprives the

sounds of their specific nonhuman otherness, reducing them to subjective human experiences. For Schaeffer the essence of sound is the content of a particular

human subjects deliberately honed aural perceptions. While Kane opposes this solipsistic analysis, his objection boils down to the claim that the sociohistorical situations of listening subjects must be taken into account. From that more encapsulating perspective, Schaeffers basic thesis may hold true: a sound is its

28 Kane, Unseen, 40. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone. (London: Verso, 2005), 74.

29 Christoph Cox, Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism. Journal of Visual Culture

10(2): 147.

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production and reception by (sociohistorically situated) humans.30 Schaeffers thinking differs from Kanes only in the latters specification that the humans in

question do their listening and creating in the context of interpersonal

relationships. Kanes unwritten assumption that musical sound must be thought

anthropologically belies the same anthropocentrism that undergirds Schaeffers.

For both theorists, the essence of sound is only human.

While its true that an exhaustive analysis of music must account for the

human players, actions, traditions, social circumstances, and ideologies involved,

such an analysis should also account for what makes sound sound and not just another human construct. Schaeffer recognized that music exists somewhere

between nature and culture.31 Despite the false dichotomy produced by his

reductive terminology, his remark is telling. It implies that music consists of

nonhuman entities and acts (nature) as well as human ones (culture). Specifically, sound objects or sounds in-and-for-themselves are givens or grounds that humans filter and interpret when we make and hear music.

Sound dwells in all things, but melodiesinhabit only the bosom of man,

Schaeffer intoned: music is humans selective reduction of the all-encompassing

otherworld of sound.32 If human perceptions and practices reduce essentially

nonhuman sounds to enculturated, sociohistorically conditioned phenomena, the

common essence of music and acoustics is not perception but the worldwide

30 Kane, Unseen, 38.

31 Pierre Schaeffer, Solfge de lobjet sonore, trans. L. Bellagamba (Paris: INA-GRM, 1967), 11.

32 Ibid., 15.

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population of idiosyncratic, self-contained, nonhuman sonic entities that exceed

perception.

Altogether, objections to sound-things as autonomous entities are largely objections to the chauvinistic, authoritarian, or essentialist ideologies of reification implied thereby. According to Sterne, scholars fear that thanks to the

objectification of sound we have forgotten how to think about music asdriven by involvement and participation, and this forgetting has limited the possibilities

for ourselves and for a more just and egalitarian world.33 The general opinion seems to be that it would be better to reduce sound to a matter of human action,

culture, history, or ideology than to risk underplaying humans ontological

privilege. This despite the unpopularity of idealism and the audible sense that

there is something to sound that is not ourselves. That otherness is what makes

sound sound, an alien being that no perception or representation can entirely

capture.

Humans desire for control over ourselves and our environment is in a

sense understandable, as perhaps it goes along with our instinct for self-

preservation. When foreignness invades our ears, we sense this control slipping

away, and with it our existential certainty. Like any deep desire, this attitude can

be overcome; but dispelling ourselves from the center of concern is never easy.

With an ideology that might stem as much from instinct as from centuries of use,

we cling to views like Sternes: sound is a thing only insofar as it is for someone

33 Sterne, MP3, 190-191.

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a non-autonomous bundle of affordances.34 Citing Heidegger, Sterne writes

that things are only things that is, only exist at all because of what they

enable people to do.35 A thing is nothing of its own accord, only the possibility of

some human action. Sterne reduces all things to commodities: use-value plus

exchange-value.

The problem could be Heidegger, who believed in humans ontological

priority. His essay The Thing seems to influence several arguments against

sonic thingness. The jugness of a jug is in no way determined by the jug, he writes. By putting wine in it, I decide that its a jug.36 Insistent on rigid differences between humans and nonhumans, Heidegger grants the ability to

encounter something as something (jug as jug, sound as sound) to humans alone although experience reveals that cars relate to sounds as sounds and

not as petrol, elephants relate to sounds as sounds and not as food, sounds

relate to ears as ears and not as delicate champagne glasses. Heidegger

seems to think that human use of objects is what gives them ontological depth, Harman writes.37 This approach wrongly casts Dasein in philosophys starring

role, while preserving the unfortunate belief that the world[consists of] neutral

slabs of material accidentally shuffled around or colored by human viewpoints.38

34 Ibid., 189.

35 Ibid., 193.

36 Martin Heidegger, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstader (New York: HarperCollins, 2001),

170. 37

Harman, Tool-Being, 16. 38

Ibid., 19.

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2 Against Durability

Heideggers reductive view of things defines them first by their availability

to humans, second by their durability. A jug is a thing insofar as it things, he says, and thinging seems to mean a things gathering of its constitutive and

relational characteristics into a manifold-simple unity that stays for a while. A

thing is a phenomenon that issues from the world and in its own way stay[s] put

to in turn implicate the world.39 Presumably a sound couldnt be a thing for

Heidegger, since although sounds are of the world and available to humans,

sounds do not stay.

Accordingly, many music and sound scholars object to the idea that sounds possess anything like the durability of things. Instead they subscribe to

traditional theories of sound as vibrations of a medium.40 In all such views, the

preeminent quality of sound is transience: sounds do not last, therefore they are

not things, and arguments to the contrary are paradoxical. For example,

Eidsheim writes: the experience of sound is temporal arising and coagulating

only to pass all too quickly. Thus a musical experience is not something that can

be captured in notation, but an open-ended and pluralistic negotiation of sound in

all its physicality.41 Similarly, for Cox, sounds are peculiarly temporal and

durational, tied to the qualities they exhibit over time, so [i]f sounds are

39 Heidegger, The Thing, 171-175.

40 E.g., see Helmholtz, Physiological Causes, 52-53.

41 Nina Eidsheim, Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening, Senses and Society 6(2):

136.

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particulars or individualsthey are so not as static objects but as temporal events.42

OCallaghan recognizes that sounds have qualities of objects and events. Sounds are traveling particulars [that] are in certain respects surprisingly object-like. They can be created; they have reasonably defined spatial boundaries but

persist through deformation; they survive changes to their locations and other

properties; and they are publicly perceptible.43 Granted, they make peculiar

sorts of objects: their capacity to overlap and pass through themselves [and others] makes them stranger than most everyday objects.44 Indeed, a sound is also something that happens to something: a dynamic occurrence that takes

place within [a] medium.45 Eventually OCallaghan discards sonic objects in favor of events. He concludes: whatever events turn out to be, sounds should

count as events.46 But having conceded, given sounds ambiguity, that the

difference between events and time-taking particulars and objects may be just a matter of degree, he apparently permits the possibility that events might turn out

to be objects.47 Struck by this same possibility, Cox proposes that instead of basing

sounds ontology on that of objects, philosophers should do the opposite: consider the ontology of objects in terms of that of sound. Indeed to begin with

42 Cox, Beyond, 156.

43 Casey OCallaghan, Sounds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 26.

46 Ibid., 58.

47 Ibid., 27.

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sound is to upset the ontology of objects and beings, suggesting that the latter are themselves events and becomings.48 This is the beginning of an idea that is

at home in OOO; but unlike Cox, Harman realizes that it cuts both ways: if being

means occurring, then occurring is also being. Entities are events and events

are entities (see 3). OCallaghan and Cox are unwilling to go this far. In their analyses, despite

the latters commitment to Deleuzian flux, events and objects do not ontologically flow into each other but stumble into an ancient paradox. If objects are merely events of long duration or as Cox says, becomings that, however, operate at

relatively slow speeds then presumably sounds (which in Coxs view are not objects) are events of short duration or becomings at higher speeds.49 Does this mean that protracted sounds are in fact objects? Does it mean that short-lived objects are not objects? A mayfly lives for twenty minutes: its lifetime is shorter than a Romantic symphony, shorter than the average piece of drone music. Yet

isnt a mayfly a thing, in the sense of an autonomous, durable entity? How long

must staying stay in order to be thinging?

This is a version of the Sorites paradox, first attributed to Eubulides of

Miletus: how many hairs must someone lose in order to be bald? If a rock loses

its atoms one by one, how many can it lose before its no longer a rock? How

long must a sound be in order to be a thing? These questions are paradoxes

because their solutions rely on indeterminable limits. The durability of sound is 48

Cox, Beyond, 157. 49

Ibid.

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relative. The blare of a car horn might fade out of my hearing in a matter of

seconds but linger in the ears of a street elephant or imperceptibly flutter a thread

on a tasseled awning long after the fact. The durability of things is equally

variable: compare a quick-dissolving tablet with a mayfly or sequoia. But the

problem runs deeper than that. Where do sound and tablet end, breeze and

water begin? The problem with sounds and things is ontological vagueness.

Theres no decisive boundary between what they are and are not.

Thomasson believes that this is a problem with language, not an

ontological problem or even a philosophical one: vagueness resides in our

representations, not in the world and its denizens.50 Phenomena themselves

arent vague, only our descriptive terms. This includes the words object and thing, which Thomasson says are too vague to make ontological distinctions.

To ask if some phenomenon qualifies as a thing is therefore an underspecified,

unanswerable question, she attests.51 But this argument simply shuts the

question down.

Why couldnt there be vague objects without rigid ontological boundaries? Arent human bodies such objects? Wouldnt my body remain my body if someone took a kidney out of it? Yet isnt it simultaneously true that there is no

difference between my body and my kidney? The boundaries between us are

fluid, fuzzy questions.

50 Amie Thomasson, Ordinary Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105.

51 Ibid., 114.

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Might a sound be a vague object? Ive cited several theorists who believe that the boundaries between sound and not-sound are questionable, yet some

boundaries must exist. Even these theorists sense some kind of division

between what sound is and what its not. Otherwise, they wouldnt argue a

distinction between sounds and things. Just as quantum physics turns the

difference between particles and waves, entities and changes, into an open

question, so the question of sounds thingness reopens the question of things

vagueness.

It therefore isnt true that vague predicates like the word thing say

nothing about reality. Vague predicates reveal that reality is vague; they open it

for questioning. Its durability that is purely arbitrary as an ontological

criterion.52 The Sorites problem demonstrates that duration isnt evidence

enough for or against the thingness of sound or any other event. Rather, sounds

apparent lack of durability complicates the questionable relationship between

durability and things.

In other venues, Ive made every objection to sonic thingness. Ive argued against phantasmagoria, atemporality, ideologies of reification and domination.

These objections remain valid in any realm that assumes: clear distinctions between human and nonhuman beings; the ontological, ecological, and ethical

priority of humans over nonhumans; and the idea that all it takes to make and

perceive art is sociohistorically conditioned human creativity. I no longer believe

52 Harman, Tool-Being, 294.

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in any of those things. However, thats not to say that all aspects of prevailing

sonic theories are not true. Chauvinism and totalitarianism are unacceptable. A

sound is a wave, temporal phenomenon, and subjective experience. It is indeed reductive to represent such phenomena as entities and vice versa. Sonic

experience is one of the most intimate experiences we have with our own bodies,

as it happens in the depths of our heads; at the same time, this experience is

sociohistorically conditioned. But none of that is all there is to it. Sounds may be

all of that as well as objective, non-ideal entities that exist in and for themselves, possessing and questioning autonomy and durability.

3 Object-Oriented Ontology

Adhering to a rigid dichotomy between things and events entails

overlooking a crucial quality of both: things and events both perpetrate their

being and in doing so physically impact other beings. In Bennetts vital

materialism, a thing is an entity with thing-power: a source of action that can be

either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has

sufficient coherence to make a difference.53 Objects are agents, Morton says, in that through them causalities flow.54

Sounds possess their own sounding-thing-power which renders it

impossible to ignore the fact that the being of things is a doing and an impact. 53

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), viii. 54

Morton, Hyperobjects, 29.

23

Sounds are indeed causal agents: in music they inspire emotions, in sound

cannons they inflict injuries. Shaken by the sonic thing-power of music, Morton writes: it tunes to me, pursuing my innards, searching out the resonant

frequencies of my stomach, my intestines, the pockets of gristle in my

facesound as hyperobject, a sound from which I cant escape, a viscous sonic latex.55 On this view, sounds are things, their effectiveness reminds us of all

things potency and its reasonable to acknowledge that music is a collective

encounter between human and nonhuman bodies.56

Thing-power is non-equivalent to Heideggerian affordance, which is for

humans alone. Instead, thing-power is the effect that things have on any and all

other things, which may or may not be human. Yet from Harmans perspective

even this idea is incomplete. In vital materialism, he argues, each object seems exhausted by its presence for another, with no intrinsic reality held cryptically in

reserve.57 But this unreachable reserve exists in OOO, wherein things are

radically autonomous and durable, irreducible to any relationship or set of

relations even as they are inherently relational, contextual, temporal, and

effective. This is one of many contradictions metabolizing at the heart of every

being.

OOO is a plausible foundation for a credible theory of sonic thingness.

Harmans metaphysics provides all entities with enough relationality and

55 Ibid., 30.

56 Citation omitted for blind review, 207-208, emphasis added.

57 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero, 2011), 12.

24

transience to satisfy sound theorists and maintains the otherness of things. It

enables relations themselves, including events, to count as things.

The first tenet of OOO is that things are radically autonomous. Even

though an entity is the unified, systematic relation of its manifold qualities and

components, which in turn is determined by contextual relations, the entity is also

something separate, over and above those relations. Harman writes: objects will be defined only by their autonomous reality. They must be autonomous in

two separate directions: emerging as something over and above their pieces,

while also partly withholding themselves from relations with other entities.58 A

sound is its frequency and amplitude; it is also more than that. Its an issuance

from a source and a phenomenal relationship to hearers; and it is more than that.

This something more is a withdrawn essence unique to every individual,

a hidden surplus inexplicable in terms of any relationship between the individual

and another.59 Objects withdraw from human view into a dark subterranean reality that never becomes present to practical action any more than it does to

theoretical awareness.60 Further, the same is true of the sheer causal

interaction between rocks or raindrops. Even inanimate things only unlock each

others realities to a minimal extent, reducing one another to caricatures.61

Harman explains: [i]f numerous entities encounter any given object, each runs across it as a vastly different causal power to reckon with. Each of them frames

58 Ibid., 19.

59 Harman, Tool-Being, 2.

60 Ibid., 1.

61 Ibid., 2.

25

it from a specific perspective, opens itself up to it as a distinct and limited kind of

impact[T]he sum total of all such impacts never adds up to the reality of the

[thing] there is always more where that came from. Every entity forever holds

new surprises in store.62

Harmans term for the radically autonomous, superfluous, extraordinary,

and imponderable essence of every entity is tool-being. This has nothing to do

with the things role in human praxis; instead a things tool-being is the aspect of

it that withdraws from every causal and perceptual relation. The tool-being of

the object lives as if beneath the manifest presence of that object.63 [T]he real force of tool-being lies in its resistance to all holism, its withdrawal behind any

seamless web of relationsresist[ing] all possible practices, significations, and

even inanimate contexts.64

A things withdrawn aspect is its essential aspect: what makes it truly itself.

A thing is durable in that there is always something left over of it from its

relations, and whats left over is the objects existence in-and-for-itself, in its own terms and nothing elses, not even in terms of atoms and quarks. Generally

speaking, there is strife between the presence of a thing and its being.65 The

true chasm in ontology lies not between humans and the world, but between

objects and relations.66 All relations are reductions.

62 Ibid., 227.

63 Ibid., 220.

64 Ibid., 171-174.

65 Ibid., 4.

66 Ibid., 2.

26

Nothing demonstrates this more effectively than sound. A human listener

experiences an aria as a sound shaped by composers choices, performers

idiosyncrasies, and certain aesthetic traditions not as anything else, even

though the sound has countless other features. To a delicate glass, that same

sound wouldnt be an aria but a shattering blow. The human listener reduces it

to an operatic experience, unable to perceive it as a fatal blow. The glass

reduces it to a blow, unable to experience it as an aria. The air reduces it to a

minor change, unable to detect either the aria or the death blow. Meanwhile the

sound itself is not only aria, disturbance, and mortal strike, but also more than all

of those phenomena. Every sound withdraws into its vast inner reality, which is

irreducible to any of its negotiations with the world. Only in its relations with other

entities is it caricatured, turned into a unitary profile.67

The reductiveness of relation is evident in all the sonic theories Ive

described. Each perspective reduces sound to one or a few of its numerous

aspects, e.g., subjective experience, temporal event, sociohistorically conditioned human praxis or the possibility thereof. These perspectives ignore others, e.g.,

sound as an autonomous agent with enough durable, tactile force to serve as a

bullet-replacement. And all perspectives overlook the hidden surplus of every

sonic interaction. That excess is the sound in itself: not the exclusive

phenomenon that Schaeffer called lobjet sonore, but something that eludes every phenomenon and description.

67 Ibid., 169.

27

A things durability is its excessiveness and hiddenness and its reversal

into presence, into unitary profiles interacting with others.68 The staying-power of

a thing is this continuous alternation between hidden essence and present

caricature. This metabolism between [essential] being and [relational] beings is

the meaning of being.69

During its metabolism, a thing creates and exudes its own temporality and

context. In OOO, temporality is not the fact that things dont last; instead a

things temporal existence is precisely its metabolism of its hidden reality and

relational caricatures as it withdraws from and manifests in its encounters.

Temporality is really nothing more than this very interplay of reality and

projection, says Harman.70 This thorough duality of every situation, this interplay of equipment and observer, shadow and light, is the specific

chiaroscuro of every moment.71 In addition, simply by being themselves, things

to some extent determine how they relate to others, thereby generating and

characterizing the total relational web that we call the world. Being entails

projecting oneself into context-generating relations. Every entity is sincerely engaged in executing itself, inaugurating a reality in which its characteristic style

is unleashed.72 Things create their contexts as they are their contexts.73

Objects explode being and time, as even the single instant is already outside of

68 Ibid., 67.

69 Ibid., 68.

70 Ibid., 145.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid., 220.

73 Ibid., 23.

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itself[T]he supposed static instant is not really static at all, but rather ek-static

already torn apart by its own incurable ambiguity: that internal strife between an

entitys subterranean force and its seductive faade.74

Thus an apparently static thing isnt unchanging or ahistorical but quite

the opposite. A thing is strife, relation, and context even as it is not. Moreover,

the converse is also true: every set of relations is also an entity.75 Morton

builds on this last point in his postulation that an autonomous object may be a grand system of relations on spatiotemporal scales too vast for any human to

take in. On this view, global warming is a thing, even as it is also an event and a

condition. An earthquake is a thing, so is a climate. Such grand objects, which Morton calls hyperobjects, are ambiguous, at once nonlocal and contextual, viscous and withdrawn.76 Even the most humble objects share these qualities.

And so does sound. Since things in OOO are ek-static systems and self-

contained essences, the OOO perspective neither brackets nor entirely submits

to the contingencies so vital to sonic theories. There is room in OOO for sounds

to be sociohistorical, temporal relations as well as durable entities that are

irreducibly other.

OOO has other advantages too. First, if all relations are incomplete, since

no entity includes all of itself in any relation, then no entity or type of entity is

ontologically prior to any other. Even the relationship between a thing and its

74 Ibid., 64-65.

75 Ibid., 260.

76 Morton, Hyperobjects, 201.

29

own phenomenal qualities excludes the essence of the thing. Hence neither

humanity nor any of its practices or constructs can claim ontological privileges.

Rather, in OOO, things are absolutely first, not just as facets of a viscous cosmic mesh, but as self-contained, withdrawn individuals known to nobody, not even

themselves. Every being includes an infinite regress: every essence has a

deeper essence as well.77 OOO posits an irreducible dark side to every object, which in the end is unanalyzable as it contains objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects.78

This is OOOs second advantage. Rather than foreclosing attempts to

question the being of things, by virtue of its infinitude this paradoxical regress

always resists foreclosure. Things withdraw their singular truths from the briefest

surface-encounters and the deepest ontological probes, which means that there

is always more to ask. Where visible objects like the jug tend to obscure, in a dazzling display of pretended obviousness, the relational non-relational

contradiction that essentially metabolizes them, sounds foreground this

contradiction. Sounds strangeness illuminates the fact that all things and

relations are stranger than they ever seem. Sounds make questions out of

thingness and things.

In the shifting but inclusive light of OOO, sounds put rigidifying ideologies

and ontologies in their place. Additionally, as OOO illuminates the weird

viscosity of entities and encounters, sounds extreme otherness and bizarre 77

Harman, Tool-Being, 258. 78

Morton, Hyperobjects, 44.

30

thingness become more overt possibilities. While Cecchetto doesnt embrace

sound-things explicitly, his sonic theory is consistent with OOO. He

acknowledges the infinitely withdrawn quality of sound, which like dark matter is

perceptible yet ultimately imperceptible. [E]very sound is a ghost, he writes,

which is why we are always looking for the sources of sounds, trying to place

and identify them: we hunt down hauntings and flush them out, only to always

hear more.79 Distinguishing what we hear from what sound actually is,

Cecchetto also recognizes the reductiveness of relation. When we hear a sound

we register what we hear and foreclose the rest, he says.80 And since hearing

is irrevocably tied to signification, we only ever hear what is meaningful to us:

only sonic content that we can relate to ourselves and other beings. What we

hear is a caricature of actual sound listening is reduction. The sound itself, the

sound-ness of its sounds disappears, withdraws from all hearing.81 As

irreducible otherness that eludes every relation, sound is equivalent to Harmans

tool-being: the objectness of objects. Cecchettos analysis paves the way for committed theories of sonic thingness based on OOO.

4 Questioning

79 David Cecchetto, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2013), 47. 80

Ibid., 153. 81

Ibid., 51.

31

Theories that reject the possibility of sonic things by denying sounds autonomy and durability do so based on anthropocentric ideologies or reductive

definitions of thingness that annul sounds otherness and impact. Such theories

are primarily motivated by the fear that understanding sounds as durable,

autonomous objects would dissimulate sounds innate relationality and temporality. But object-oriented ontology offers an open-ended conception of thingness as a continuous metabolism of temporal relationality as well as durable

autonomy. In OOO, things are paradoxical: every entity consists of a necessary,

hidden essence and contingent presence, separated by an irreconcilable

ontological rift. Consequently, things are irreducible to their relations even as

they are their relations. As things in the object-oriented sense, sounds would retain their potent and absolute otherness while losing none of the experiential

relativity thats critical to aesthetic theories. OOO provides a democratic forum in

which relational sonic theories and object-based sonic practices may approach reconciliation. At the same time, OOO discourages attempts to posit a privileged

type of being (Dasein or any other) to which sounds, entities, or relations may be ultimately reduced. Instead, the withdrawn ambiguity of entities in OOO ensures

that every ontology, including that of sound, will remain an open question.

But what if OOO were subject to critique? Its possible that like any other theory, this ontology rides on a hidden ideological undercarriage, not an

anthropocentric one but just the opposite. Indeed its tempting to reduce OOO to the de-anthropocentric ideology that advances the agendas of radical ecology.

32

Radical ecology critically opposes the capitalist principle that humans ontological

and ethical priority entitles us to a coldly utilitarian view of nonhuman beings.

Instead, radical ecology promotes an ontological anarchy in which no entity is

sovereign over any other, but each entity celebrates the absolute otherness of

every other.

Using OOO, Morton calls for ecological awareness in the form of a double

denial of human supremacy.82 This means that humanity deserves neither

ontological priority nor the privilege of distancing itself from other kinds of being.

OOO provoke[s] irreductionist thinkingin which ontotheological statements

about which thing is the most real (ecosystem, world, environment, or conversely, individual) become impossible. Likewise, irony qua absolute distance also becomes inoperative, as all events and entities equally constitute

the same kind of thingly being.83 Mortons ecological metaphysics is a vital

extrapolation of OOO, and the echoes of radical ecology are clear. Does that

mean that ecological de-anthropocentrism indeed powers OOO from underneath,

as an ideology?

Id like to say that if it did, all the better. But my argument is precisely that

sound cannot be reduced to human experiences, actions, or constructions, ergo

the question of sounds thingness cannot be reduced to an ideological decision.

Arguably any attempt to decide the question on utilitarian, semantic, aesthetic,

ecological, or ethical bases would not respond to the question but foreclose it on 82

Morton, Hyperobjects, 19. 83

Ibid.

33

grounds that will probably turn out to be ideological in the light of critique.

Fortunately all humans, nonhumans, and relationships are things in Harmans

work. OOO isnt a matter of anthropocentrism or de-anthropocentrism but simply

of things on equal ontological footing. Hence to respond to the question of

sounds thingness with OOO isnt just to say that we ought to appreciate sounds thingness, otherness, and durability because, for example, only such awareness

can alert us to sound cannons dissembling rhetoric. Such ethical reasoning is

possible, even wholeheartedly welcome, but its just one of many insights that OOO facilitates. To respond to the question of sounds thingness with OOO

really is to say something about reality. At the very least, it reveals that sound

demonstrates just how strange reality is. From that observation, infinite questions follow.