Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception by Mark Grimshaw & Tom Garner

Author:Mark Grimshaw & Tom Garner [Grimshaw, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

Hallucination and Sensory Psychopathology

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” (The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams, 1922)

Try to consider the most fundamental and universal dimension, one that can be readily attributed to any conceivable entity or action. Our attempt at this first arrived at binary differentiation, equal and not equal (two things are either the same or they are not the same). It then occurred to us that “equal” might itself be most accurately described as an abstract concept, essentially an illusion that enables sentient organisms to better interact within their environment. Initially this sounds rather implausible but if your conditions of equality are stringent enough, every evaluation reveals difference between two entities. No two people are the same. Any mass-produced products (no matter how rigorously variations in construction are controlled) will have minute but discernible variations in dimensions and weight. If we were to examine the currently smallest known constituents of matter, the proposition that all such particles are identical remains theoretical (see Goldstein et al. 2004) and while physics has generated a principle of indistinguishability, this “merely defines what we mean by [identical] particles” (Cabello and Cunha 2013, 1). Of course, it could be argued that even if such a principle were proven to be absolute, no two particles could occupy the same position in space and time (even if they can be in two places at once).

For us then, the term “equal” is actually impossible and only “difference” is the single absolute dimension. We extend this theory to perception and assert that no two sounds can be identical and that this includes two simultaneous perceptions of a single stimulus. This relates to our perceptual acoustic ecology framework that positions sound within the mind and the mind as a virtual summation of the elements brain, body, and environment. Within this framework, the nature of any sound is characterized by all these components, their sub-elements, and the relationships and processes between everything (the virtual cloud). Therefore any change within this system will alter the final form of the emergent sound (of course, this is not to say that such an alteration would always be perceptible to us). Formalized structures such as representation and language may result in two listeners stating that the sound they perceive is a car. However, if you could acquire greater access to their experience they may both perceive the sound as a V8 muscle car engine; this would of course require that both listeners shared a significant interest in car engine sound. Let us imagine that our two listeners are actually expert engineers who are competing in a challenge to determine who has the most attuned listening skills. As the detail required from the competitors becomes more specific we become more likely to discover a differentiation in their perceptual experience. Taken even further, our

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