SOUNDS IN BAYSIDE

By Emily Koehn
An interview with our Bayside philosopher about his new book, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007).

B: How did you come up with the title for your new book? Were there any other competitors?

C: Honestly, there were a bunch of competitors. One was The World of Sounds. But it sounded too philosophical. I wanted to keep it short and sweet, which is more of my style, and not make the title excessive. A friend of mine titled a recent book of his about loyalty to friends, family, and country The Limits of Loyalty, and I liked his sense of aesthetics--call it what it’s about.

B: Describe what your book is about in three sentences.

C: Physics or science tells us that our environment is filled with disturbances and pressure waves that travel through the medium. The end result is that we hear sounds, music, pitch, timbre. The book is really about how it is that our brains and our auditory perceptual systems translate information about pressure waves and vibrations into auditory experience.

B: What is one of you favorite Bayside sounds? What is one of your least favorite Bayside sounds?

C: A favorite sound is hearing the plows move throughout the night in the winter. My least favorite sounds are heard in the summer, when the windows are open, and the f-bomb drops all throughout the day. That gets old surprisingly quickly.

B: Are sounds different in any way in Bayside?

C: As with any built urban environment, with few trees and little vegetation, it’s a highly percussive and reverberant neighborhood.

B: Are you drawn toward those types of sounds?

C: Yes. I live here. In fact, you can get more information about your environment in these surroundings. They’re complex, information-rich, acoustic environments with little sound dampening. (Some would say “sound-polluted.”)

B: What’s the easiest way to dampen sound and sound pollution in Bayside?

C: Trees and other absorbent, non-reflective materials, many of which are organic. In short, soft things. For example, notice when we have snow in the winter, how much quieter it is in Bayside.

B: Where did you compose most of your book?

C: In a third-story room in my home on Portland Street. I don’t look out the window, though--I face away from the window.

B: Give Baysider readers some advice on how to best listen to sounds.

C: Depends on what kind of sound. For music or when you’re trying to abstract from the source and listen just to the sound, close your eyes. But if what you want to learn is what’s going on around you through listening, trying to hear what someone’s saying, or when you hear the start of an engine, listen with your eyes, too. You’ll hear the sound with more detail.

B: Why did you decide to philosophize about sounds?

C: I’ve always had an interest in music. I’d say music first drew me to sounds.

B: Are sounds better than smells?

C: It depends on which sounds and which smells.

B: Who is the main audience for your book?

C: Cognitive scientists who are interested in perception as well as philosophers interested in understanding how perception depicts or represents the world as being.

B: I’ve heard one unexpected Baysider made it into the acknowledgements section?

C: Yes. My dog, Jackon. He’s got much better hearing that I do--very attentive to sounds. (He’s pretty good at smells, too.)

B: What will your next book be about?

C: The senses.

B: What about the senses?

C: How we distinguish different sense modalities from each other and how this discussion has been impacted by recent empirical discoveries dealing with exotic sensory phenomena like cross-modal perceptual illusions, synesthesia, and alien or nonhuman sense modalities. It deals with things like echolocation, electrochemical senses, neural plasticity, and sensory prosthetics.

B: Anything else you’d like to mention to the readers?

C: See you around the Bayside neighborhood.

B: Thank you for speaking with me.

C: My pleasure.