| Summary: | Several contemporary philosophers have claimed that sounds should be considered as events. Sounds happen, they begin and stop. As a consequence, this thesis may seem to be obvious; but in spite of its apparent obviousness, it raises some important questions. It is indeed necessary to ask whether this thesis necessarily contradicts some famous theories about sounds. For example, should this definition of sounds lead us to reject Locke’s claim, according to which sounds are secondary qualities? Another important theoretical work, which has to be confronted with the definition of sounds as events, is Pierre Schaeffer’s one, which describes and classifies sounds through the concept of object. The confrontation is especially problematic, since Schaeffer’s “sonic object” is something which can be repeated by the help of recording; on the contrary, events are generally considered as unrepeatable. Nevertheless, it is possible to conciliate Schaeffer’s views and a theory of sounds as events, if attention is paid to the fact that a sonic object is not a concrete acoustic event, but only the complex structure of audible qualities which can be reproduced by the means of technology. There is also a second kind of questions, concerning the nature of the events sounds are supposed to be, and concerning their location. Several theories have been proposed on this topic in contemporary literature. Most acousticians define sounds as waves propagating in a medium. On the contrary, Roger Scruton considers sounds are “pure” events, which do not happen to any material object, and do not have any determinate location. The theory examined here is the one developed by Roberto Casati and Jérôme Dokic. According to them, sounds are the vibrations occurring in the sounding objects themselves, and not the waves which make it possible for us to hear them. Casati and Dokic claim that their theory is consistent with the phenomenological content of audition, which means that we usually hear sounds as located in the sounding objects. Several objections have been made against this theory, and its authors have replied to them with detailed argumentation. A new objection is proposed here. To support their thesis, Casati and Dokic claim that the content of our auditory experience is not correctly described when it is said that a sound fills a room. According to them, we should simply say that this sound can be heard from any place in the room. The objection consists in arguing that this theory does not do justice to the importance of the reverberation of sounds. Casati and Dokic mention reverberation when they explain how echoes are to be theorized according to their views. But reverberation is phenomenologically different from echoes, and the way it affects our auditory experience seems to justify the description of sounds as filling space. Nevertheless, this argument cannot be considered as a true confutation of the theory. It is only supposed to show that the theory should include further analysis of reverberation to be fully convincing.
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