Against Manifestationism

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

This question – so often disregarded as a thought experiment for bored undergraduates – unsettles more than it seems. It suggests a horror: that the world might not exist unless we verify it. That the sonic is nothing until we receive it. This book begins with a suspicion: that sound is dismissed.

In 1883, cultural periodical The Chautauquan defined sound as “the sensation excited in the ear.”¹ A year later, Scientific American echoed this logic: “If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”² These are among the first recorded instances of the ‘tree falls’ conundrum. But the reduction they point to didn’t begin in the nineteenth century.

Philosophers and natural scientists have long treated sounds either as subjective sensations or waves in a medium. As far back as Lucretius (1st Century BC), there were particulate models of sound as a motion in the air hitting the ear.³ Seventeenth-century scientists such as Galileo and Descartes refined this into the wave theory, describing sound as the ruffling of air that moves the tympanum and insisting that what we hear are not objects but “movements coming from them”.⁴ Physicalist accounts still define sound as mechanical vibrations propagated through a medium.

This is the dominant epistemology of sound in Western culture: correlationist on the one hand (sound is sensation) and empirical-reductionist on the other (sound is vibration). Either way, sound is not its own. It belongs to something else: the body, the event, the graph. It’s not real – it is derived.

This is what I call sonic manifestationism: the belief that sound only exists in or for its appearance – how it manifests. It’s a dogma that stretches from acoustics and psychoacoustics to phenomenology. It reduces sound to perception, to physics, to code. It treats sound as trace, not presence. As proxy, not participant. Sonic manifestationism is not an isolated mistake but a deeply sedimented lineage: a tendency to collapse sound into sensation or vibration and to deny its autonomy.

Yet for all its explaining, sonic manifestationism doesn’t reflect how sound behaves. Nor how we treat it. We locate sounds. Sculpt them. Archive them. Endure them. They persist. They withdraw. They return. We speak of a sound, this sound, that sound – not as metaphor, but as thing.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong points out that sound is marginalised not because it is unreal, but because it resists our usual criteria for objecthood: it is temporal, elusive, partial.⁵ But aren’t so many real things? – Weather systems, legal frameworks, cultural memory. Psychologists studying the phenomenon of “earworms” – songs that loop in our minds – find that participants recall melodies with remarkable pitch accuracy.⁶ A sound can linger, return, and shape attention even when no air is moving.

To accept sound as real isn’t a rejection of the ephemeral. It simply recognises that ephemerality doesn’t preclude being. Sound’s reality is not exhausted by the moment of hearing.

Feminist and decolonial theorists like Nina Eidsheim and Dylan Robinson remind us that reducing sound to sensation or signal is never neutral.⁷ The racialised voice, the Indigenous protocol, the protest chant – all risk being erased if sound is understood only as effect, and never as agent. Denying sound’s objecthood denies certain people, cultures, and practices the right to be heard as real.

What artists like Wong, and sonic theorists like Marcel Cobussen and Christoph Cox, have begun to argue is that we need a sonic materialism: a refusal to deny the audible world its force and autonomy just because it exceeds fixed categories – a position shaped in part by strands of speculative realism and Deleuzian thought.⁸

The realism I sketch in this book is such a refusal. A refusal to reduce sound to perception or vibration. To treat it as ghostly, ambient, unreal. Instead, I argue that sound is a material, contingent, temporally emergent object. Not because we hear it. Not because we measure it. But because it does things.

Sound – it collides. Persists. Withholds. Repeats. Affects. And who are we to say, “sound isn’t?”

It’s not secondary. It’s not a trace. It’s not a signal in a system. It is a neighbour.

Notes

1. ‘Editor’s Table’, The Chautauquan, 3(9) (1883), p. 543.

2. ‘Notes and Queries’, Scientific American, 50(14) (1884), p. 218.

3. Lucretius (2001 [c. 55 BCE]) On the Nature of Things. Translated by M. F. Smith. Indianapolis, Hackett, Book IV, lines 524 to 600.

4. Galileo, G. (1954 [1638]) Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences. Translated by H. Crew and A. de Salvio. New York, Dover, pp. 101 to 103; Descartes, R. (1649) ‘The Passions of the Soul’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, Article XXIII.

5. Mandy-Suzanne Wong (2020) ‘The Thingness of Sound’, Sonic Field, 11 September. Available at: https://sonicfield.org/ the-thingness-of-sound-essay-by-mandy-suzanne-wong/ (Accessed: 26 July 2025).

6. Evans, M. G., Gaeta, P. and Davidenko, N. (2024) ‘Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery’, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 86(6), pp. 2124 to 2135.

7. Eidsheim, N. S. (2019) The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Durham, Duke University Press; Robinson, D. (2020) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

8. Cobussen, M. A. (2022) ‘The Sonic Turn: Toward a Sounding Sonic Materialism’, New Sound: International Journal of Music, 60(2), pp. 11 to 24; Cox, C. (2011) ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2), pp. 145 to 161.