Sound as idea and matter: the problem of the nature of sound in the context of subject-object relations

Novikova Valeriya Sergeevna Lecturer; Tomsk College of Economics and Industry 634040, Russia, Tomsk region, Tomsk, Irkutsk tract, 175 val_novikova97@mail.ru

Introduction

Sound, as a subject of close interest from modern researchers and music practitioners, is being comprehended in a variety of discourses and refractions: from the analysis of the sound of the environment with a focus on biological and geographical issues to the artistic and symbolic aspects of the sounding and its socio-political modalities. However, often, highlighting different facets of this concept, individual studies of sound have common ontological foundations as a conceptual core, placing a lot of heterogeneous, specified research around some core idea. Sometimes this constitutive view of the nature of sound is so imperceptibly sewn into the fabric of the statements constructed by the author that it is not recognized as a separate, once predetermined assumption. At the same time, ignoring this issue has an adverse effect of moving away from thinking about sound as such, i.e. as an integral, self-sufficient object, and shifting interest towards discussing particular problems of sound expression that are in the field of attention of various applied disciplines.

Thus, a certain view of sound is associated with certain forms of thought, ontological and epistemological assumptions. As one of such assumptions appearing in philosophical explications of sound problems, we highlight the contradictory nature of the definition of the subject and object of sound research and the unclear position of these concepts within cultural and natural relations, which determines the priority of either mind or matter. It is through this point of ontological uncertainty that the watershed divides the two core vectors in the conversation about sound: subject-oriented and object-oriented optics, or in another way the opposition of constructivism/materialism. The purpose of our work is to identify the features of this differentiation, analyze the consequences of such a division and identify strategies for removing this conceptual binary.

The object of our research is the field of sound studies, a relatively new interdisciplinary branch in the humanities that deals with the study of sound both in the ontological plane and in the cultural dimension. Despite a significant amount of work interpreting sound practices, listening, soundscapes (soundscapes), silence and noise, most of these studies are highly specialized developments. In addition, the boundaries of sound research today are extremely unstable and mobile, changing depending on the chosen focus of scientific interest, but subordinated to a single general theoretical vector: "The themes of sound studies are difficult to catalog, but demonstrate the entire spectrum of postmodern shift: from musical harmony to non-musical technical and organic sounds, noise and silence, from time to space, from spirit to body, from inspiration to algorithm, from composer to listener, from feeling to perception" ^{[1, p. 83]}. Any apparent ambiguity in sound research is explained by the interdisciplinary nature of this field: the term "sound studies" gathers a wide and rather eclectic field of theoretical directions, whose resources this field of knowledge somehow involves: anthropology, urban studies, art history, musicology, literary studies, psychoacoustics, sociology, history, ethnology, etc. Accordingly, there is no unambiguously approved, fixed interpretation regarding the very concept of "sound studies". For example, Jonathan Stern's anthology provides the following definition: "Sound research is the name of an interdisciplinary field in the humanities that takes sound as an analytical point of departure or arrival. Analyzing both sound practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, they (sound research) re-describe what sound does in the world of people, and what people do in the sound world" ^{[2, p. 2]}. For Stern, sound research is not limited to the ontology of sound and material processes, but they also include human variables. A similar definition is found on the pages of other anthologies that set a certain canon of research practice. For example, the authors of the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, also point out that sound studies cover the consideration of how sound production is inscribed in history and cultural context ^[3]. In contrast to this "anthropocentric" understanding of sound stages, sound materialists propose to concentrate the heuristic potential of sound research around the material essence of sound. For example, from the works of Christophe Cox, who, although he does not explicitly formulate the definition of sound research and pays more attention to the concept of sound art, it becomes clear that the main subject of sound studies should be "sound understood as a physical, intense force" ^{[4, p. 17]}.

Thus, the field of sound research itself is still in a state of groping for its boundaries and capabilities and developing its own methodology reflecting the unique nature of the problems under consideration. Being the field of an ongoing battle between two opposing discourses, sound research retains an element of ambivalence in all fundamental issues: from the connection of auditory and visual to the differentiation of music and noise or issues of sound perception. The presence of a large number of disputed territories on the "map" of sound research sets the relevance of work in this area. Modern researchers and observers of this field have yet to determine how to get out of the current situation of uncertainty, what an alternative methodology should look like, the most appropriate for such a complex and multifaceted field, and how the subject and object of sound research should be understood. Accordingly, the subject of our analysis is the concept of sound, inscribed in the conflict of antagonistic views on subject-object relations in the field of sound studies.

A subject-oriented approach

The first and most widespread view of sound in modern literature – the subject-oriented one – sets the following conceptual framework: sound finds existence exclusively in the act of listening. This approach is part of the body of the "linguistic turn" in the humanities, which sets an anthropocentric dimension to any research. Such anti-realist trends that dominated Western thought in the second half of the 20th century include semiotics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. These correlationist approaches deny the idea of a predetermined world of material entities with strictly referring signs to them and insist on the unprepared meaning and multiplicity of interpretations. Our experience is extremely symbolized, immersed in a field of infinitely expanding and flowing meanings connected by a network of associative connections with other semantic matrices, the meaning of which is never constant. The work finds its vitality only in discourse, in the process of unfolding, in each new linguistic situation demonstrating its non-identity to itself. Its existence is marked by the seal of a unique, recreated being each time, constructed at the moment of its execution by the interpreter's thought. Sound art is configured as an open text, as a dynamically developing structure included in the reference system ^[5]. The "original", extra-symbolic signified, embodying the material reality and physical aspects of sound, tend to be treated with deep distrust as an ephemeral and unsubstantiated area. That is, representatives of anti-realist trends divide the world "into a phenomenal area of symbolic discourse, which marks the boundaries of the knowable, and a noumenal area of nature and materiality, which excludes knowledge and meaningfulness" ^{[4, p. 19]}. Thus, subject-oriented optics is implicitly outlined by Kantian presuppositions that cast "sound-as-such" into the realm of the noumenal inaccessible to direct perception. Nature, including the sound reality available to us, is a social construct in which the cultural, historical, political, and personal foundations of the subject of perception are embedded, always implicitly outlining a certain epistemological framework. The construction of a sound object is always already contained in the very act of listening. Sounding modeling is the work of a subject with a complex conceptual grid.

One of the authors developing this approach to sound is Seth Kim-Cohen. In his work "In the Blink of an Ear", exploring sound art, Kim-Cohen advocates a revision of the principles of sound art, rejecting "sound-as-such" in favor of an expanded reading of the concept of sound, which embodies an irreducible textuality. Sound cannot be given to us as a material substance, living its own life, existing independently of a person outside of discursivity and signification. Therefore, for Kim-Cohen, the claim of the new materialists to proclaim sound as a material basis regardless of the subject is nothing more than an essentialist delusion devoid of meaning. We can talk about sound only in close connection with language, discourse, and representation. The author points out that even if we admit that some kind of pre-discursive, extra-linguistic reality exists, in any case we are not able to approach it and express it in language. Therefore, we can only keep ourselves in the field of representation and signification if we want to gain adequate knowledge within the framework of sound research ^[6]. The limits of discourse also mark the limits of being.

The semiotic unfolding of sound existence forms the basis for Salome Fegelin's understanding of this phenomenon ^[7]. For her, sound is an object that reveals itself to the recipient in a direct individual experience "here and now", in the inner immersion of the subject into auditory matter. Sound acquires existence only at the moment of its direct representation in the auditory experience of the subject, therefore we cannot approach the auditory object with the help of rational and logical tools. There is no gap between the hearer and the audible. Taking Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a conceptual and methodological model, with its prioritization of sensory apprehension over rational cognition and the formulation of a unique meaning each time that destroys collective preset meanings, Fegelin extends these principles to the field of auditory and proclaims the infinite multiplicity and randomness of semantic formation, always far from a substantialized completion. That is, the sensory experience of sound perception binds together the phenomenology of the lived sensation and the semiotics of the emerging meaning. Expelling all "objectivity" from the field of semantic content, we can say that the perception of sound is a purely lonely experience based on personal imagination and an inward–looking understanding of what falls into the field of perception. Its fixation requires from us, as listening recipients of sound experience, close introspection and careful interaction with our own experiences, seeking out and revealing sound objects in the endless stream of listening. Thus, the researcher develops specific ways of philosophical and aesthetic treatment of the figure of sound.

Another variant of the explication of sound experience, synthesizing semiotic and phenomenological optics, is probably presented by one of the most famous sound researchers Michel Shion. Shion separates the concepts of "sound object" and "sound event", indicating that sound is located somewhere in between these modes. By classifying different levels of listening ("causal listening", "code listening", "reducing listening", "language listening", "aesthetic listening", etc.), Shion demonstrates that, despite the fact that at the level of the element, i.e. individual sound elements, there is a "sound continuum in which... speech, noise and music belong to the same world... our listening is always discounted, it "maneuvers" between completely different levels" ^{[8, p. 48]}. Accordingly, the qualification of music as music and noise as noise is not related to the natural nature of the sound elements, but to our perception, depending on the cultural and individual context. So, different ways of listening are different encodings by which we define acoustic material in one way or another.

Among the authors who share the aspiration towards phenomenological methodology, one can also include Don Ayda, who considers the experience of listening to sound and the influence of technology on the transformation of this experience ^[9], and Jean-Luc Nancy, who opposes listening as a pre-discursive, pre-subjective attention to sound existence, coupled with the expectation of resonant meaning, which promises to open up a little ^[10].

Anatoly Ryasov develops a phenomenological approach to sound within the framework of Russian literature. Ryasov, who brings sound stages and philosophy closer together, wants to build an ontology of sound based on the concept of pre-reflexive listening, in which the subject is "captured" by a sound phenomenon, immersed in sound in its "ultimate abstraction" ^[11] to any sense. The ontological is understood by Ryasov as a space of the pre-communicative, where the sign loses its meaning. Of course, Ryasov is right in assigning philosophy a significant role in the formulation of the main issues of sound problems (this partly brings him closer to Cox, who stated that his project is precisely philosophical), however, the very possibility of building a stable ontology of sound as a meaningful touch to sound raises doubts among a number of researchers, while belonging to the polar directions of thought: relatively speaking, among "materialistic ontologists" and representatives of "kontrontology" ^[12]. The former, represented by Cox, reject the "subjectivity" of the phenomenological approach to sound, the latter, represented by Francois Bonnet, reject the possibility of designing an ontology of sound in general. From Bonnet's point of view, phenomenological optics rightly emphasizes the problematic nature of the sounding, its duration, fluidity and fundamental inconsistency in a static form, but Ryasov's further step towards the ontological definition of this sounding seems to be illegal in the context of Bonnet's views. In the work "The order of sounds. The sounding archipelago" Bonnet proceeds from the recognition of the procedural, elusive nature of sound to the statement that sound does not have its own essence and, accordingly, does not imply any universal ontology ^[13]. Sound is something that constantly eludes us, that we cannot fix, that we cannot point to, and that already disappears at the moment of its origin. As Nikita Safonov summarizes Bonnet's thought: "Any attempt to build an ontology of sound or an ontology of noise will be an effort to catch in our human discursive networks something that fundamentally cannot be caught" ^[12]. A metaphorical illustration of this idea is the image of unexplored island archipelagos scattered in the waters of the world ocean, which can only occasionally be found on the horizon. Proponents of this approach emphasize the fundamental limitlessness of auditory phenomena, which turn out to be a different sound event in each new act of reproduction: "... there are only separate multiple territories, possible worlds, traces, zones of influence, vague attempts to name what is nameless" ^[14]. However, if we take a closer look at the external opposition between Ryasov and Bonnet, the falsity of its premises will be revealed: the initial divergence of views is based on the difference in the interpretation of the subject of phenomenology by the authors. In Bonnet's understanding, the subject of phenomenology is a perceiver acting in the auditory field, who directs his consciousness to sound objects, registers their properties and controls them, i.e. the intentionality of consciousness is placed here in a subordinate position in relation to the subject, is its product. However, for Ryasov, the subject is someone who is initially immersed, tipped over into listening and "captured" by sounds. The phenomenological approach itself calls into question the roles of the subject and the object of sound experience, starting to consider the subject as constituted by listening ^[15].

If we now turn to the criticism of the subject-oriented approach as a whole, then its main flow comes from the side of sound materialists: the main target of their indignation is an excessive concentration on discourse and language, leading to the rejection of "pure" ontological objects as a noumenal area inaccessible to grasp by this discourse. The price for the anti-realistic orientation of the thought of these researchers is, from the point of view of the authors prioritizing material existence, "epistemological and ontological limitations" ^{[4, p. 18]}. Sound as such, along with metaphysics, is pushed beyond the boundaries of our attention, being recognized as transcendent to our knowledge and experience.

In addition, anthropological chauvinism, which is supposed to be a subject-oriented approach, turns out to be a target for criticism, in which the symbolic order of interaction with the environment acts as proof of human uniqueness and superiority. Sound materialists object to this pedaling of their own exclusivity by pointing out that human history and culture are only part of the natural history of the universe, always preceding any symbolic signification ^[4]. Therefore, sound, as belonging to the primordial material plane of the natural world, precedes any attempts to be constructed through and for the subject. Thus, the materialist theory criticizes the dualistic gaps of culture/nature, human/non-human, axiomatically accepted by the subject-oriented approach, and suggests focusing on those ubiquitous processes that underlie both natural and symbolic life.

Object-oriented approach

The object-oriented approach draws our attention to the physical characteristics of sound, which manifest themselves as mechanical vibrations in certain environments. In this case, sound is something that exists regardless of the presence of the subject, even if it is not included in our range of audibility. According to Ian Campbell, who explores the origins of sound realism, this approach to sound is inspired by Gilles Deleuze's theory of affect, on the basis of which sound is represented as a vibrating matter or force that cannot be reduced to a subjective or cultural interpretation ^[16].

Sound materialism has become increasingly widespread in recent decades. This approach, representing the existence of sound as independent and unrelated to the existence of the perceiving subject, owes its spread to the "ontological turn" that stirred up the field of philosophy in the 20th century. Among the characteristics specific to this branch of thought are the rejection of anthropocentrism, an emphasis on the pre- and extra-social material, an appeal to scientific approaches, and an interest in the field of potential and universal. These conceptual principles are positioned as antipodes to the dominant theories of twentieth-century continental philosophy: social constructivism, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. In contrast to socio-cultural paradigms, discourses of signification and textual analysis, the ontological turn, discarding Kantian echoes in philosophical thought, promises a turn to the authentic, primordial, real. Currently, attempts are common to conceptualize sound as a specific object and give this object an independent ontological status. Adherents of this approach aim to focus on the material and essential representation of sound and transcend the boundaries of representation and signification, which are characteristic of linguo-oriented humanitarian projects. Among the authors striving to overcome these limitations are Christophe Cox, who substantiates the materialistic ontology of sound through the concept of "sound flow" ^[4], Steve Goodman, who develops the ontology of sound vibration ^[17], and Greg Hynge, who explicates the ontological theory of noise in relation to various media ^[18]. The works of these researchers are largely imbued with the ideas of the "forefather" of sound art John Cage, in particular, his thought about the aesthetic and philosophical priority of materiality over sociality and culture, recognition of the primacy of sound matter before the intention of human hearing to pack it into the usual structural blocks of audible sound, the desire for sound-in-itself in isolation from the imposed it is influenced by human feelings and ideas ^[19].

Expanding the conceptual framework of the object-oriented approach, let's take as a representative example the sound research of Christophe Cox. Cox uses the concept of "sound flow", which defines sound as an "eternal material flow" ^{[4, p. 9]}, for which the mapping discourse of the subject will be transient and which, in relation to this discourse, manifests itself as preceding, fundamental and dominant. Cox's sound materialism promises the completion of a language-oriented project revolving around the human subject as a receiver and interpreter of auditory signals. Cox builds an ontology of sound based on a metaphysical system based on the Deleuze division of "actual" and "virtual" ^[20]. This dichotomy presupposes the following descriptive definitions: "actual" is permanent, empirical objects embodied in the natural world; "virtual" is mobile, ever-changing forces and energies that generate "actual. As Cox's interpreter Brian Kane formulated this dichotomy: "If "actual" denotes the realm of realized possibilities, then "virtual" is the realm of pure possibility or pure potency" ^{[21, p. 22]}. The researcher argues that these potencies, or "differences" governing matter, do not originate in linguistic, conceptual or cultural foundations and therefore act "below the level of representation and signification" ^{[4, p. 29]}. Cox insists that sound itself always acts as this generative principle, i.e. it always belongs to the virtual. To substantiate the virtual nature of sound, Cox differentiates music and sound art, defining music as a form of representation involved in a symbolic and imaginary order, and sound art as an area of sound that reveals the ontological properties of sound. Music, through composition, focuses human attention on the formal specifics of the organization of sound, or, in Deleuze's language, "territorializes" what sounds. Sound art, according to Cox, is able to open access to the auditory "real" and redirect the listener's attention "from the foreground, overloaded with relevant objects and things, to the virtual background of the conditions of opportunity" ^{[21, p. 33]}, i.e., a kind of "substrate" hidden under the cover of the actual. Sound art explores sound as such, its materiality, revealing the "true metaphysics of sound" ^{[4, p. 25]}. Thus, a sound stream is a kind of core from which all explicated signs appear and into which they disappear, and which "elegantly and powerfully manifests and models the myriad streams that make up the natural world" ^{[4, p. 10]}. In this connection, listening appears as a way of compressing and dismembering this superhuman current by biological or mechanical means. Thus, while searching for pure "sound-as-such" with its maximum abstraction and lack of reference to objects of the real world, Cox distributes sounds according to their degree of ontological completeness.

But the attempt to build a similar hierarchy between the actual and the virtual is accompanied by inevitable problems. As Kane correctly notes, building his concept around works of art that reveal their ontological nature (Kane calls this principle "ontoesthetics"), Cox makes a categorical mistake by mixing together the concepts of "embodiment" and "exemplification" ^[21]. Exemplification is a form of reference in which objects "symbolize by referring to certain properties of themselves" ^{[22, p. 19]}. Embodiment, on the contrary, is a form of existence or a state in which an object is an object of a certain type. That is, the embodiment ontologizes the object and cannot have gradation according to the degree of its manifestation – it either exists or it does not exist. In his justification of the ontology of sound art, Cox constantly slides between these diametric modes of "is" and "heard as", obscuring the fundamental difference that exists between them, and thereby imperceptibly violating the law of identity in his reasoning. It is in mixing exemplification and embodiment that Cox makes a mistake that threatens to destroy the original pathos of the materialistic concept: for Cox, one piece of sound art does not just sound more sonorous than another, but it is more sonorous than another. That is, Cox imperceptibly suggests that some objects better exemplify being an object than other objects, or, in another way, they are more suitable instances of their essence. But this method of ranking objects assumes that we already know in advance the characteristics, or predicates, according to which we will judge whether these objects belong to the class of material or formal: "if acts of exemplification refer to and rely on a pre-existing system of values in which the exemplified predicates are already ordered, then even if a work of art is possible to exemplify their ontological properties, not a single act of exemplification goes "beyond the limits of representation and signification" ^{[21, p. 32]}. And this contradicts the core principles of ontoesthetics, which was originally supposed to lead works of art away from their cultural prerequisites to material foundations. In addition, since the virtual, opposed to the actual, is fundamentally unimaginable, Cox has to resort to an auxiliary crutch in the form of analogies or similarities to describe this virtual, thereby unlawfully erasing the very boundary between the actual and the virtual and, as a result, identifying them. These similarities and the very possibility of hearing them in sounds are formed in the context of an auditory culture, in which the subject of perception is involved through the development of auditory techniques. As a result of this substitution of concepts, Cox implicitly embeds analogies based on culture into his supposedly culturally free analysis of works of art.

The absurdity of attempts by sound materialists to anonymize sound, i.e. to obscure its origin and identifiability with a specific source, is demonstrated by sound researcher Polina Dronyaeva: "... the European ear, accustomed to recognizing harmonies, finds threshold harmonic phenomena even in the music of La Monte Young, which is a model of abstract sound for materialists, where only one tone sounds extremely long and loud" ^{[23, p. 64]}. And indeed, "pure" sounds, "devoid of reference to "somatic bodies"" ^{[23, p. 64]} is an ideal object that is never achievable, which crumbles as soon as we try to build strict hierarchies prescribing which types of sounds should be considered closer to the Real One.

Another side of criticism argues that Cox and other representatives of the "ontological turn" in sound research introduce into the corpus of auditory hierarchies based on the division of actual-virtual, culture-matter, subject-object, and thereby implicitly legitimize the idea of the superiority of the white, masculine, Eurocentric subject in the production of knowledge mediated by sound and by hearing ^{[24, 25]}. In its pursuit of objects and matter, this approach completely drowns out any issues related to social, politics, history, culture. As a result, such secularized ontological concepts are accompanied by the identification of being in general with the being of a Western, bourgeois person, which automatically eliminates other modes of being from the category of possible producers of "sonic knowledge" ^[24]. This problem is covered in detail by Annie Goh and Mary Thompson, which will be explicated later.

In addition, in an effort to overcome the traditional Kantian division into noumenon and phenomenon, Cox actually only reproduces the same dualistic foundations, but now more subtly camouflaged. The postulation of a pure sound-in-itself and an unrelated subject "out of nowhere" presupposes isolation from any cultural determinants that include the subject in personal-historical relations. Accordingly, Cox, inheriting Kant's thought, excludes the sensory-emotional basis from the sphere of cognition, leaving only reason on the pedestal as an unsurpassed triumphant. At the same time, the anthropogenic nature of knowledge production and the fact of cultural and historical "engagement" of the subject remain unaccounted for. Therefore, despite Cox's desire to overcome Kant's "subjectivity", his uncultural subject turns into a reborn Cartesian subject ^[24]. Insisting on sound-in-itself, i.e. on sound as a mind-independent reality, Cox reactualizes the same division into matter and culture as noumenal and phenomenal, which he seeks to overcome. The preservation of this inconsistency is due to the maintenance of traditional subject-object relations, in which an abstractly understood, "groundless" subject gives meaning to a passive object of nature. Thus, the very postulation of the "ontological turn" carried out in sound research can be accepted only with significant reservations.

The Middle Way

Thus, the gap between the two approaches, understood in accordance with the classical division into abstract subjects and objects in general, becomes deeply drawn and insurmountable. But such an irreconcilable confrontation is not effective for addressing the phenomenon of sound as such. In connection with such an unsatisfactory state of affairs, there is a need to find some third, middle way that allows you to break the vicious circle of prejudicial wanderings around sound, but never a genuine approach to it.

Tom McEnany, in his research on the sound turn, defines this third path as materially symbolic: "attention to sound meaning has allowed us to establish a connection between listening, language and sound, which makes it possible to discover a third path between materialism and constructivism, thereby placing the sound turn inside a generational attempt to enrich social constructivism, formalism and historicism taking into account material culture, non-human life and technological changes" ^{[26, p. 87]}. Thus, McEnany argues that the sound turn highlights the central role of listening practice, placing knowledge in the body and the senses. The practice of listening in this context is beginning to be rethought as a historically conditioned material and social technique. Thus, it is given the status of a new method that successfully combines the reality of material life with social constructivism and cultural performativity. That is, we must reorient our listening from the position of passive perception to active models involved in the transformation of experience and at the same time inscribed in a certain socio-cultural context. Thus, we can trace the meaning of sound, i.e., indicate the dynamic meaning-making that takes place, if we find a connection between the physiological production of vocal sound and the cultural associations that arise on its basis. Referring to a study by Nicholas Harkness ^[27], McEnany gives an example of such procedural sound-making, in which a certain sound timbre of the voice becomes an expression of certain social positions: "a common social ritual of the twentieth century in Korea was drinking soju with his boss at the end of the working day. A pleasant exhalation after drinking soju, which Harkness calls a "fricative vocal gesture," in this context is associated or indexed with (usually male) authority. Harness shows how this sound is then used in other situations to indicate authority. In a remarkable example of the narratological significance of this sound, Harkness observes how a Presbyterian preacher uses this "fricative vocal gesture" in a sermon to highlight the voice of Jesus and point out the powerful authority of this voice. Thus, the repeated use of sound in one social context gives it a special meaning, which can then be picked up in another context to continue this general meaning" ^{[26, p. 91]}. All this confirms the need to take into account the connection between the material sound and the cultural component. The available ontological models, which understand sound exclusively as material vibrations, reduce the sound experience, avoiding talking about how these flows of vibrational energy through the cilia in the human ear are transformed into cognitive-sensory impulses, "which are neurologically processed into a phenomenological and cultural event, usually understood as sound" ^{[26, p. 93]}.

Even before McEnany, Brian Kane also argued about this, criticizing the "ontological turn" for neglecting auditory culture and denying its constitutive role. Distinguishing between the concepts of "sound stage" and "auditory culture", Kane notes that sound stage focuses exclusively on the ontology of sound, developing a naturalistic approach to sound based on the teachings of Gilles Deleuze about the virtual and the actual. Kane targets three authors for his criticism: Steve Goodman, Christophe Cox and Greg Hynge, arguing that all three, despite differences in the construction of the ontology of sound, share a single metaphysical system that involves criticism of "representation" and "signification". Taking Jonathan Stern's research as an alternative to the new materialists, Kane draws our attention to how Stern explains the concept of auditory perception techniques. These techniques are the ways in which the forms of our listening are formed and improved in the course of performing actions. That is, these actions allow us to interact with the world around us and gain new experiences, and listening becomes a technical skill that can be trained. At the same time, these actions are formed not only by the consciousness of an individual as his personal history, but also largely determined by the cultural context: education, social environment, geographical specifics ^[28]. As an example of such actions, Stern points to practices such as listening with a stethoscope in medical practice, learning telegraphic communication and mastering various sound reproduction technologies, in particular the first experiments using early telephony and phonography, which are not only mental operations, but also bodily training, which just "give shape to the techniques of auditory perception" ^{[21, p. 26]}. In other words, Stern in his work tries to trace how social and cultural conditions are embodied in the interaction of the body and the machine and are reflected in the transformation of the concepts of sound and hearing and the development of listening and perception practices.

Thus, Kane, following Stern, raises the question of the role of bodily practices in the production of listening: "Research in the field of auditory culture is not just research on "representation" or "signification" without considering the body. Rather, researchers of auditory culture seek to demonstrate transitions and switches between awareness and affect or, in a broad sense, between consciousness and body. As students acquire new skills, most of the awareness efforts associated with the initial stage of learning are shifted to the body. At the same time, bodily capabilities form the ground for both the current learning and potential improvement in the future... Bodily abilities are cultivated simultaneously with the embodiment of culture. By focusing on training and acquiring skills when bodies are forced to act in order to produce and maintain ways of listening, research in the field of auditory culture more subtly articulates the interaction of mind and body than a sharp dichotomy" ^{[21, p. 26]}.

As we can see, revealing the shortcomings of reductionist materialistic concepts, Middle Way researchers propose new versions of sound materialism that would not be isolated from the discussion of auditory culture. These are precisely the approaches that correspond to the understanding of sound as originally conceived by sound studies.

For example, in one of her works, Mary Thompson also analyzes the problems that take place in the version of sound materialism proposed by Christophe Cox. Thompson draws our attention to the fact that the general models, among which the materialistic theory of sound is inscribed, are in fact not neutral, i.e. not biased models. The tools with which a certain phenomenon is dissected always bear the imprint of being inscribed in the world. Our ways of thinking are inextricably linked to cultural and socio-political attitudes, aesthetic prejudices, gender and racial epistemologies. Based on this premise, Thompson argues that the ontological turn in sound research is based on the so-called "modest white aurality" ^[25]. The departure of the new materialists from the analysis of how cultural representation shapes human social existence, which was the subject of theorizing for the subject-oriented paradigms of the twentieth century, leads to the fact that being is equated with being a Western, bourgeois man, and other ways of being are simply obscured. Thus, ontology is "whitewashed", excluding the black man from the sphere of being defined by whites, pushing him into oblivion, hidden from us by a universalized ontology. Thus, by positioning itself as something that is outside the social categories of race, object-oriented ontology actually promotes a position embodying the dialectic of racism. This orientation towards resistance to anthropocentric problems of cultural representation, signification and identity finds its continuation in sound discourse. Analyzing Cox's sound research, Thompson notes that although his concept of sound as a stream is stated as a general model, it is by no means neutral. His concept casually forgets that it contains a perceptual scheme of whiteness. Inheriting the ideas of the founder of sound art John Cage, Cox introduces a distinction between music as a discursive, semantic, iconic integrity and sound art as an independent materiality, at the same time drawing a distinction between the composer and the curator. The composer is the one who organizes the sound array in accordance with his own tasks, while the curator acts only as a traceless observer, freed from specific optics. The position of the curator, according to Thompson, is associated with the categories of "whiteness, masculinity and Eurocentrism, it refers to an objectless position from which the world is observed from everywhere and from nowhere, and from which bias is "removed" by obscuring" ^{[25, p. 274]}. This self-isolation of the white, masculine, Eurocentric position allows you to stand on the level of an "objective" judge of the aesthetic value of any work, displacing from the sphere of genuine art everything in which echoes of personal history and original rootedness in culture are heard. Thus, the foundation of this "modest white aurality" is associated with the manifestation of the opportunity to hear sound-as-such, or sound-in-itself, while obscuring the relationship of sound with the social world, depriving the materiality of sound art of the soil of lived sociality. Therefore, Thompson draws our attention to the fact that we should always approach sound art products with the question of what underlies a given sound object, and be aware of what relationships ontology has with the social world and the conductor of which contextual knowledge that constitutes the perceived is sound materiality.

Annie Goh follows a similar path when she suggests using feminist epistemology to rethink the figures of the subject and object of sound research, which previously had not been given due attention. It demonstrates how an uncritical attitude to subject-object interaction leads to gross violations in the theories of the production of "sound knowledge" and becomes the ground for the spread of sound naturalism. Goh, following Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, introduces the concept of "ontoepistemology" into sound research, and she suggests calling her method "sounding situational knowledge", suggesting that this method should reconsider "the dominant dualisms of traditional relations between nature and culture" ^{[24, p. 283]} in the study of sound. From Goh's point of view, the emerging field of archaeoacoustics, which helps to understand human behavior in the past, has the potential to become a politico-philosophical "location", which was described by Haraway ^[29]. As a "material-semiotic object" ^{[24, p. 285]} for archaeoacoustics, Goh suggests the figure of an echo, through which subject-object relations in sound can be redefined. The figure of the echo acts here as an active, meaning-modeling object that forms part of the bodily production of knowledge. Goh, like many others, recalls that the production of scientific knowledge in relation to nature is gender-conditioned, which also applies to the production of "sound knowledge": patriarchal ideas and gender subject-object relations (the idea of the dialectic of control of the male "subject" over the female "object" of sound experience) structure sound naturalism in sound theories. According to Goh, sound naturalism can be traced in the works of such different authors as Christophe Cox, Jean-Luc Nancy with his concept of resonance in the text dedicated to listening ^[10], and R. Murray Schafer with his work on "soundscapes", contrasting the unnatural loud sounds of the industrial world of modernity and the natural quiet sounds of the world of the past ^[30]. Once again directing the arrows of his criticism at Cox, who manifests the overcoming of the Kantian dualism of the noumenon and the phenomenon in the materialistic tradition, Goh points out that in fact, like Kant, he draws a dividing line between the abilities of the mind and the sensory-emotional environment, pushing into the back drawer the problems of the body and the study of the processes of knowledge production. Thus, we again get a picture of reality in which matter and culture, as passive and active principles, are separated from each other by an impassable abyss, and sound becomes a thing-in-itself. Goh, on the other hand, brings the interweaving of knowledge and being to the forefront of research, striving to overcome the classical binary separation between the "masculine subject/mind/culture and the feminized object/matter/nature" ^{[24, p. 290]}. Her focus is on the body as a place of knowledge production, and at the same time, the body is complex, structuring and structured, inscribed in cultural and political practices of formation, as opposed to an abstract, universal view from above. Goh is trying to find such a portal into an alternative way of producing "sound knowledge" in archaeoacoustics and rethinking the figure of echo, through which subject-object relations can be theorized. In the figure of the echo, "material and physical representations in acoustics and symbolic and semiotic representations in mythology are intertwined simultaneously" ^{[24, p. 300]}. As a material and physical phenomenon, echo includes reflection and diffraction, but its properties can also have significance on a symbolic level when we talk about the loosening of traditional subject-object relations. Reflection and diffraction can be considered simultaneously as material and semiotic phenomena. An echo, understood as a sound reflected back, can be considered as a violation of what was previously voiced, i.e. what was presented as initial knowledge. With this view of the echo figure as diffraction, it is assumed that the simple reflection of the same thing, but in a different place, is abandoned, and the possibility for making differences is set. Thus, due to this introduction of gaps and differences and the destabilization of the position of the knowledgeable subject, echo acquires the potential to revise the classical subject-object relations in the production of "sound knowledge".

Conclusion

Summing up the analysis of ways of interacting with the nature of sound, it is possible to formulate approximate definitions of the modern subject and object of sound research. The subject should not be a purely rational, sterile, non-correlative Cartesian figure, but a multidimensional, holistic personality rooted in social existence and aware of its "tainting" by the cultural and historical context as a necessary prerequisite for cognition. The object is no longer a passive material surface on which human efforts to encode and decode sound streams are superimposed, and in the same way it is not the final product of subjective symbolic construction; the object is an active participant in material–discursive relations. Based on the concept of agent realism by Karen Barad, it can be stated that binary oppositions of mind and matter, culture and nature within the framework of traditional subject-object relations are removed in cultural practice, which includes bodily techniques for producing knowledge about sound and presupposes mutual agency, or impact, in the process of interaction between human and non-human actors ^[31].

Thus, having considered the characteristic features of both approaches, the nature of their confrontation and strategies for getting out of the formed paradigmatic dualism, it becomes clear to us that any attempt to absolutize one's own position and manifest another "turn" radically opposed to existing optics does not lead to constructive results and only multiplies problematic situations. If we take a closer look at the statements of representatives of both conceptual camps, we can see that the very dichotomy of the two views on sound is questionable and even artificial. So, the two approaches actually have more in common than they would like to admit. Many of the ideas advocated by constructivism could easily have entered the corpus of materialistic discourse if the authors had paid more attention to the details in their reading. This means that researchers of opposite directions need to turn to face each other and once again consider the criticized positions, but no longer abstractly understood as homogeneous wholes, but in a specific application to culture. We need to turn to a new conceptual dictionary that includes critically understood subjects and objects of sound research and the connections between nature and culture that arise at the junction of their interaction. We must discard universalism, ahistoricity and neutrality in the view of subject-object characteristics and include in new ways of interpreting these concepts their positionality, i.e. embeddedness in certain cultural and political conditions as a prerequisite for the production of knowledge. If we can reassemble the dictionary in this way and rethink familiar terms, we can develop more constructive ways of dealing with the figure of sound.