Consciousness and Mental Qualities for Auditory Sensations

The contribution of recent theories of sound and audition has been extremely significant for the development of a philosophy of auditory perception; however, none tackle the question of how our consciousness of auditory states arises. My goal is to show how consciousness about our auditory experience gets triggered. I examine a range of auditory mental phenomena to show how we are able to capture qualitative distinctions of auditory sensations. I argue that our consciousness of auditory states consists in having thoughts that organize our experience. Although my proposals could be adapted to fit with other theories of consciousness, here I expand David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory and his quality-space theory, and show their usefulness for analysing our auditory experience. I use quality-space to account for pitch, timbre, loudness, and sound location. I further show that our higher-order thoughts capture qualitative aspects of our auditory sensations. I conclude by demonstrating how a hypothetical listener in possession of a refined vocabulary describes and reports her higher-order thoughts about her musical experience.