Sounds and Other Denizens of Time

Abstract

On the scientific worldview, space and time are taken to be the inextricable dimensions of a single structure called space-time. Everything that exists in time also exists in space. There are no instants or intervals in time detached from spatial locations.Space and time are closely intertwined even in the ordinary worldview. We ascribe reality primarily to things such as portions of matter, living organisms and concrete artifactsthat is, individual things that exist in space-time. However, the ordinary worldview seems to have room also for individual entities existing in time but not in space. Minds or souls were once prominent candidate entities of this sort, but nowadays the most favored examples are entities created within certain social and cultural practices.In this respect, Rohrbaugh (2003, 200) talks about "historical individuals" such as linguistic texts or musical compositions being "in time but not in space." Thomasson (1999, 36) describes fictional characters as "abstract artifacts" that "lack a spatiotemporal location," but specifies that their existence can have a beginning and an end in time. Ferraris (2005, 42) claims that social objects such as debts, contracts, and even nations "do not exist as such in space but subsist as traces (inscriptions, records in people's minds) and, through these traces, acquire duration in time". Smith (2003, 23) calls "freestanding Y terms" objects like symphonies, debts or corporations, which can exist independently of a particular spatial embodiment, and observes that "a symphony (as contrasted with the performance of a symphony) is not a token physical entity at all; ratherlike a debt, or a corporationit is a special type of abstract formation (an abstract formation with a beginning, and perhaps an ending, in time)." Scruton (2009, 50) argues that sounds also are purely temporal entities since they basically are "pure events [...] identifiable separately both from the things that emit them and from the places where they are located."In this paper we propose to clarify 1) in what sense there may be individual entities that exist only in time and 2) what relationship links the existence of such purely temporal entities with the 1 Both authors made equal contributions to this work. We are especially grateful to Sarah De Sanctis and Alfredo Paternoster for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

The Early Stage of Perception of Contemporary Art Music: A matter of time

“…The 'no-space world', as Strawson conceives it, is a purely auditory world: its denizens are sounds (Santarcangelo and Terrone 2015). Strawson conceives of the 'no-space world' as a merely auditory world, which has a temporal but no spatial dimensions, treating auditory individuals as a paradigmatic case of entities that may appear to be merely temporal.…”

“…The perceptual aspect of sound has been the subject of an immense range of studies in the cognitive sciences, from psychology (Susini, Lemaitre and McAdams 2011) to neuroscience (Blood, Zatorre, Bermudez and Evans 1999;Griffiths and Warren 2004; for a review, see Santarcangelo 2015 andSiebel 2005). 4 These studies span human reactions to simple stimuli all the way up to complex feelings and emotions (Juslin 2013).…”