From Reduction to Realism

The dominant traditions – scientific, philosophical, aesthetic – have each trimmed sound down to something manageable. Something measurable. Something safe. First, sound becomes vibration – air pressure, sine wave, spectral data. Then, it becomes perception – neural flicker, auditory event, experience. Finally, it becomes symbol – a signifier to decode, a message to interpret, a metaphor. At each step, something falls away.

This chapter builds on the Deleuzian claim that sound acts – by reframing sonic objects not as essences or sensory data, but as systems of emergence. Not symbols. Not snapshots. But machines of difference – open, dynamic, resistant to capture.

The reduction of sound to vibration or sensation remains influential because the wave theory explains important aspects of auditory perception. It links perceptual properties like pitch and loudness to physical parameters like frequency and amplitude. This makes the reduction convenient for explaining why a high frequency feels like a high pitch and why a large amplitude feels loud.

But philosophers note the internal contradiction of locating sound where we seem to hear it – how it risks turning auditory perception into a “massive error theory”.¹ What is heard if sound is its hearing? It also struggles with phenomena like ultrasound and infrasound – vibrations physically similar to audible sound but outside the range of our hearing.

Sonic realism doesn’t deny the value of the wave account or the correlations between frequency and pitch. It insists that these correlations don’t exhaust sound’s reality. The throb of a subwoofer is more than a sine wave, and the roar of a storm is *more than *a spectrum: they are events, objects and forces that act and withdraw. To say that sound is real in this sense is not to deny complexity. It is to resist the tendency to flatten it into something convenient.

Critics like Rein Raud remind us that the term object can be misleading.² It could suggest a static entity, closed and discrete. Camilla Peeters, writing on noise music, warns that calling the sonic an object risks closing down its becoming.³ We have to walk a line between assertion and reduction – naming sound as real without freezing its form.

Graham Harman brings us to the uncanny middle ground. In The Quadruple Object, he argues that every object has a withdrawn core – something that remains irreducible to any single appearance, form, or function.⁴ This is what allows us to say: a waveform is not the sound. A perception isn’t the object. That sound retreats – even as it appears. But this notion, too, needs context.

Raud warns that speculative realism can drift into metaphysical detachment, forgetting that every phenomenon emerges through historical, political, and ecological conditions.⁵ So, let’s be clear. A sonic object isn’t a frozen unit. It’s an open system. It persists through variation. It resists reduction. It acts through interaction.

Peeters calls this “becoming a sound object”: a process that involves entanglement, not essence.⁶ A noise performance using contact mics on glass, amplified and looped through delay, isn’t a fixed artefact. It’s a machine of difference: one that mutates across space, feedback, material, and attention.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty might have resisted this framing. For him, perception is the site of meaning.⁷ But this framework puts too much weight on the human. A sonic realism must account for perception – without limiting sound to it. As Salomé Voegelin notes: sounds are real, but their being is contingent.⁸ They act within systems: of culture, of capitalism. This isn’t contradiction. It’s what realism looks like when it’s awake to power.

A sonic object is not a metaphor. Not a function. It is a machine of becoming – a rhythm of relation, a force that persists through interaction, feedback, withdrawal. To study it is not to explain it away but to follow what it does. To watch how it changes a room, a body, a world. To listen, not for what sound means. But for what it insists.

Notes

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (n.d.) ‘Sounds’. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sounds/ (Accessed: 26 July 2025).

2. Raud, R. (2021) Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self. Cambridge, Polity.

3. Peeters, C. (2021) ‘On Becoming a Sound Object: Noise Music as a New Materialist Practice’, Forum+, 28(3).

4. Harman, G. (2011) The Quadruple Object. Winchester, Zero Books.

5. Raud, R. (2021) Being in Flux.

6. Peeters, C. (2021) ‘On Becoming a Sound Object’, pp. 44 to 51.

7. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London, Routledge.

8. Voegelin, S. (2018) The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. London, Bloomsbury.