Bringing Sounds into Use: Thinking of Sounds as Materials and a Sketch of Auditory Affordances

Abstract

Abstract:We live in a richly structured auditory environment. From the sounds of cars charging towards us on the street to the sounds of music filling a dancehall, sounds like these are generally seen as being instances of things we hear but can also be understood as opportunities for action. In some circumstances, the sound of a car approaching towards us can provide critical information for the avoidance of harm. In the context of a concert venue, sociocultural practices like music can equally afford coordinated activities of movement, such as dancing or music making. Despite how evident the behavioral effects of sound are in our everyday experience, they have been sparsely accounted for within the field of psychology. Instead, most theories of auditory perception have been more concerned with understanding how sounds are passively processed and represented and how they convey information of the world, neglecting than how this information can be used for anything. Here, we argue against these previous rationalizations, suggesting instead that information is instantiated through use and, therefore, is an emergent effect of a perceiver's interaction with their environment. Drawing on theory from psychology, philosophy and anthropology, we contend that by thinking of sounds as materials, theorists and researchers alike can get to grips with the vast array of auditory affordances that we purposefully bring into use when interacting with the environment.Keywords: Affordances, auditory perception, dance, ecological psychology, music, sensorimotor coordination. TAKING SOUNDS OUT OF THE HEADUnderstanding the perception of sound and how we interact with auditory information is not an easy task. It is difficult to conceive an objective way of explaining auditory experiences when our perceptions of sound and our intentions surrounding these perceptions, by definition, are subjective mental phenomena. This distinction between the objective and the subjective, the mental and physical, is a problem that has dogged psychology generally over its short lifespan. Different approaches have been developed to explain these dichotomies, which have left far reaching implications on how researchers have approached more specialist areas, such as auditory perception. The dominant approaches to psychology, such as cognitive-and information processing-based approaches, explain auditory perception as the transformation of objective input (energy stimulating receptors) into subjective output (declarative descriptions of, or, responses to received input). This process of input-cognitionoutput, we argue, falls short of adequately accounting for the phenomenology of our experiences with the auditory environment.In this paper, we instead propose an alternative view to auditory perception that can account for the various creative ways we can meaningfully use and interact with sounds. Drawing on ideas from ecological psychology, this approach takes a different form of discourse to conventional cognitive *Address correspondence to this author at ...

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