The papers below set out some of the fundamental aspects of my account, but there are many further issues that remain to be addressed, in particular about the connection between auditory perception and visual perception, about the consequences of my view for an account of the perception of music and speech, and about the phenomenology of our experience of sounds. I address these issues in a monograph on auditory perception that I am currently writing.

Auditory perception. It is a commonly held view that auditory perception functions to tell us about sounds and their properties. In this paper I argue that this common view is mistaken and that auditory perception functions to tell us about the objects that are the sources of sounds. In doing so, I provide a general theory of auditory perception and use it to give an account of the content of auditory experience and of the nature of sounds.

What are auditory objects? Our auditory experience involves the experience of auditory objects – sequences of distinct sounds, or parts of sounds, that are experienced as grouped together into a single sound or “stream” or sounds. In this paper I argue that argue that we cannot explain what it is to experience an auditory object in purely auditory terms; rather, to experience an auditory object as such is to experience a sequence of sounds as having been produced by the same source.

Sounds and space. It is often argued that we experience sounds as located at their sources and that it follows from this that sounds must be properties of or events involving their sources. In this paper I give an account of the spatial content of auditory experience from which it follows that although we experience the location of the sources of the sounds we hear, we don’t experience sounds themselves as located. I argue that this is consistent with the phenomenology of our auditory experience, and that the phenomenology of our auditory experience gives us no reason to think that sounds are properties of their sources.

'What' and 'where' in auditory perception. There is a body of psychological evidence which suggests that the mechanisms that are involved in the auditory perception of the location and movement of sound sources are functionally distinct from the mechanisms involved in recognising the nature of sound sources. A number of psychologists have argued that this shows we should make a “what” and “where” distinction in auditory perception corresponding to that made in visual perception. In this paper I argue that a proper understanding of the functional organisation of the processes involved in auditory perception suggests that the distinction between “what” and “where” in auditory perception has a very different basis to that in visual perception.

Experiencing the production of sounds. In this paper I argue for the existence of a certain kind of experience that I call the experience of the production of a sound. This experience essentially involves more than one sense modality and as such is amodal. The existence of such experiences helps to explain how our experiences involving different senses is unified, and puts pressure on account of the senses that views them as essentially independent of each other.