The work of Pierre Schaeffer (theorist, composer and inventor of musique concrète) bears a complex relationship to the philosophical school of phenomenology. Although often seen as working at the periphery of this movement, this paper argues that Schaeffer's effort to ground musical works in a ‘hybrid discipline’ is quite orthodox, modelled upon Husserl's foundational critique of both ‘realism’ and ‘psychologism’. As part of this orthodoxy, Schaeffer develops his notion of the ‘sound object’ along essentialist (eidetic) lines. This has two consequences: first, an emphasis is placed on ‘reduced listening’ over indicative and communicative modes of listening; secondly, the ‘sound object’ promotes an ahistorical ontology of musical material and technology. Despite frequent references to Schaeffer and the ‘sound object’ in recent literature on networked music, concatenative synthesis and high-level music descriptors, the original phenomenological context in which Schaeffer's work developed is rarely revisited. By critically exploring Schaeffer's theorising of the ‘sound object’, this paper aims at articulating the distance between contemporary and historical usage of the term.

It has been nearly a decade since Michele Hilmes published her review article 'Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does it Matter?' 1 In the decade since, no one can deny that sound has captivated the imagination of scholars across many disciplines. Alongside the publication of numerous articles and books on sound and listening, there has been a steady stream of anthologies, such as Michael Bull and Les Back's Auditory Culture Reader, Veit Erlmann's Hearing Cultures, Jonathan Sterne's Sound Studies Reader, Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld's Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, and Routledge's four-volume Sound Studies. 2 These volumes, like all anthologies, delineate a canon of texts, organize topics, ABSTRACT 'Sound studies' and 'auditory culture' are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Yet a potential disjunction between these terms remains. Some scholars within sound studies, by turning to the ontology of sound and to the material-affective processes that lie 'beneath representation and signification' , reject auditory cultural studies. In this essay, I consider the 'ontological turn' in sound studies in the work of three authors (Steve Goodman, Christoph Cox, and Greg Hainge) and offer a few arguments against it. First, I describe the Deleuzian metaphysical framework shared by all three authors, before addressing their particular arguments. Then, I consider Goodman's vibrational ontology. While Goodman claims to overcome dualism, I argue that his theory is more rigidly dualist -and poorer at explaining the relation of cognition to affect -than the cultural and representational accounts he rejects. Next, Cox and Hainge's aesthetic theories are considered. Both are proponents of onto-aesthetics, the belief that works of arts can disclose their ontology. I argue that onto-aesthetics rests on a category mistake, confusing embodiment with exemplification. Because of the confusion, Cox and Hainge slip culturally grounded analogies into their supposedly culture-free analyses of artworks. Finally, I reflect on the notion of an 'auditory culture' , and suggest the 'ontological turn' in sound studies is actually a form of 'ontography' -a description of the ontological commitments and beliefs of particular subjects or communities -one that neglects the constitutive role of auditory culture at its peril.

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