From reduction to realism

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.

Sonic realism builds on the Deleuzian claim that sound acts by reframing sonic objects as systems of emergence.

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.

The wave account has value. Its correlations between frequency and pitch matter.

They do not exhaust sound’s reality. A subwoofer throb alters posture; a storm roar gathers pressure across air, wall, window, skin.

The claim preserves complexity by resisting the tendency to flatten sound 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In The Quadruple Object, he argues that every object has a withdrawn core - something that remains irreducible to any single appearance, form, or function.⁴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 a machine of becoming - a rhythm of relation, a force that persists through interaction, feedback, withdrawal.

To study it means following what it does.

To watch how it changes a room, a body, a world.

To listen for what sound 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.