Research

My research during the past few years has focused on philosophical questions about perception. In particular, I have been writing about auditory perception and the nature of its objects. This work stems from a more general interest in how perceptual experience relates to its objects and how it shapes our understanding of the natures of those objects. Recently, I have been working on the significance not only of audition, but also of interactions among modalities, for theorizing more generally about perception. Listed below are some projects and papers related to my work on sound, auditory perception, and cross-modal perception (and some that are not). Click to download pdf versions where available. I encourage and welcome your comments.
Research Statement

Books

Sounds: A Philosophical Theory - Oxford University Press, 2007 - A book about the metaphysics and perception of sounds.
-Table of Contents [html]
Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays - Forthcoming, Oxford University Press - A collection of new papers on sound and auditory perception that I am co-editing with Matthew Nudds of University of Edinburgh. It is under contract and due out with Oxford University Press.

Articles, published and forthcoming

Seeing What You Hear: Cross-Modal Illusions and Perception - Philosophical Issues, forthcoming.
Object Perception: Vision and Audition - Philosophy Compass, 2008.
Perception - To appear in the Cambridge Handbook to Cognitive Science, eds. Ramsey and Frankish.
Audition - To appear in the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology, eds. Calvo and Symons [toc]. I provide the theoretical and psychological framework to the philosophy of sounds and audition. I address auditory scene analysis, spatial hearing, the audible qualities, and cross-modal interactions.
Sounds - To appear in the Oxford Companion to Consciousness, eds. Bayne, Cleeremans and Wilken.
Constructing a Theory of Sounds - Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics - The traditional philosophical understanding of sounds as secondary qualities rests on a mistaken attempt to assimilate sounds to the model of colors. The common scientific understanding of sounds as waves fails to capture the temporal characteristics of sounds. I develop an alternative model of sounds as events that holds promise as a philosophical account of sounds and auditory perception. This captures the sense in which sounds are creatures of time.
Sounds and Events - To appear in Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays - I argue in this paper that sounds are best conceived not as pressure waves that travel through a medium, nor as physical properties of the objects ordinarily thought to be the sources of sounds, but rather as events of a certain kind. Sounds are particular events in which a surrounding medium is disturbed or set into wavelike motion by the activities of an object or interacting bodies. This Event View of sounds provides for a unified perceptual account of several pervasive sound phenomena, including transmission through barriers, constructive and destructive interference, and echoes.
Perceiving the Locations of Sounds - European Review of Philosophy 7, 2007 - I argue that we learn the locations of ordinary things and happenings on the strength of hearing because we hear sounds as located. In particular, we hear sounds as located at some distance and in some direction, so audition locates sounds at or near their sources. I consider and respond to different forms of skepticism about spatial audition due to Strawson, O'Shaughnessy, Nudds, and others.
Echoes - The Monist 90:3, July 2007 - Echo experiences are illusory experiences of ordinary primary sounds. Just as there is no new object that we see at the surface of a mirror, there is no new sound that we hear at a reflecting surface. The sound that we hear as an echo just is the original primary sound, though its perception involves illusions of place, time, and qualities. The case of echoes need not force us to adopt a conception according to which sounds are persisting object-like particulars that travel through space.

Unpublished comments, conference papers, and drafts

Comments on Bénédicte Veillet's "Concept Acquisition and Partial Conceptualism", Pacific APA, Mar 2008.
Comments on James John's "Representationalists Should Be Privitivists", Eastern APA, Dec 2006.
Comments on Jennifer Susse's "The Multiple Realization Argument", Pacific APA, Mar 2003.
Cross-Modal Illusions and Perceptual Content [SPP 2007 version] - I argue that a class of recently-discovered cross-modal illusions gives reason to posit a dimension of content shared across perceptual modalities and to abandon the traditional view according to which perceptual content is exclusively constituted by discrete modality-specific components.
The Locations of Sounds [SPP 2006 version] - I argue that we learn the locations of things and events through audition, that we learn this because auditory perception is spatial, and that frequently we hear the locations of sounds themselves. So, we learn the locations of things through audition because we hear their sounds to be located at some distance in a given direction.
-Poster presentation, with illustrations, based on this paper here: [pdf]
Pitch - Pitch is not identical with frequency. Nor is it the subjective correlate of frequency. Pitch is an objective though anthropocentric property of sounds.
Audible Qualities - Extends the lesson of "Pitch" to provide accounts of the musical relations (octave, fifth, fourth, et al.), and of timbre and loudness, based on the notion of critical bands. Also addresses counterarguments based on spectral shifts experienced by recipients of cochlear implants, which are analogous to color spectrum inversions.