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From Visual to Aural Space: a Change of Paradigm?*

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From Visual to Aural Space: a Change of Paradigm?* FROM VISUAL TO AURAL SPACE: A CHANGE OF PARADIGM?* FREDERICO ALBERTO B. MACÊDO Resumo: neste artigo discuto como a influência de Visualism levou à concepção equivocada segundo a qual o espaço é principalmente um domínio visual. Diferentes abordagens para a percepção mostram evidências de que todos os sentidos estão envolvidos na percepção do espaço. Pesquisas recentes sobre percepção auditiva e localização humana também mostram evidências de que o sistema au- ditivo tem a capacidade de detectar e processar as infor- mações espaciais em um nível insuspeito por pesquisadores que consideravam a audição como uma sensação com pou- cas informações sobre as relações espaciaia. Na conclusão, sugerem que a mudança de visual para o espaço auditivo pode representar mais do que simplesmente uma mudança de variáveis​​, mas um sintoma de uma mudança cultural mais profunda, uma consideração mais equilibrada dos sentidos como um todo, refletida na antiga idéia de sensus communis. Palavras-chave: Percepção auditiva do espaço. Percep- ção. Percepção espacial. n order to describe space as an aural domain, the first , Goiânia, v. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. 2011. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. , Goiânia, v. step is to deconstruct, or overcome, the idea that space is primarily a visual domain. The emphasis on the visual estudos I sense exerted a powerful influence on the development of western philosophy. This influence also permeated the stud- 151 ies of perception. As happened with the study of all senses other than the visual, so the auditory system has often been described in its relation with vision, and in many cases research on auditory perception has been conceived of as an attempt to transpose to the aural domain the principles and mechanisms of visual per- ception. In a sense it may be the natural consequence of the fact that much more is known about visual perception than about any other sensory modality. However, it is important to keep in mind that this emphasis should not mean the reduction of all experience to what can be understood or conceptualised in visual terms. As Ihde points out: Philosophy and its natural children, the sciences, have often blindly accepted this visualism and taken it for granted. It is not that this tradition has been unproductive: the praise of sight has indeed had a rich and varied history. The rational- ity of the West owes much to the clarity of this vision. But the simple preference for sight may also become, in its very richness, a source of the relative inattentiveness to the global fullness of experience and, in this case, to the equal richness of listening (IHDE, 2007, p. 8). According to McLuhan, this visualism is a cultural feature of western civilization, and had its origins in the development of literacy and the collapse of oral traditions in early Greece. In the Middle Ages orality was still important, as literacy was not wide- spread and written language was regarded as just a representation for speech, and the texts were meant to be read aloud. With the development of print, the consequent dissemination of literacy and the increasing development of the sciences, the visualist tendency became dominant in western culture, exerting a powerful influence both on the way reality is perceived and, on the way perception is understood and conceptualized by western man. Before the development of the alphabet and literate cultures, the emphasis in the aural sense was not the norm among oral cultures: 2011. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. , Goiânia, v. For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind lived without a straight line in nature. Objects in this world resonated with estudos 152 each other. For the caveman, the mountain Greek, the Indian hunter […], the world was multicentered and reverberating. It was gyroscopic. Life was like being inside a sphere, 360 degrees without margins; swimming underwater; or balancing on a bicycle. […] Speech, before the age of Plato, was the glorious depository of memory (MCLUHAN, 2004, p. 68). Originally, the reflection about perception started in phi- losophy. Heraclitus and Aristotle discussed the differences and relative value of different sensory modalities. Democritus, Plato, Descartes, Locke and the phenomenologists discussed the role of the senses for the constitution of knowledge (IHDE, 2007, p. 6-13). The early 20th century saw the emergence of the experimental study of perception, constituted by the confluence of contributions from specific fields in physical sciences, such as acoustics, optics and psychology. Behaviourism was the dominant paradigm of the moment, and this influence is evident in the early studies of perception, which tended to focus just on observable behaviour, disregarding high level processes, such as prior knowledge, cogni- tion, expectations and beliefs (Neuhoff: 2004, p. 6). Despite being still important, the experimental approach is no longer the only one. Nowadays, the study of perception is a rich interdisciplin- ary field, which welcomes contributions from different areas of research, including neurology, neurosciences, cognitive sciences and trends in psychology other than behaviourism. According to Valkenburg and Kubly (2004, p. 113), two kinds of rifts separate the community of perceptual researchers, theoreti- cal rifts and modality specific rifts. Two main theoretical approaches can be identified, the constructivists, or experimentalists, which “use simple stimuli and well-controlled artificial environments to explore lower level sensory processes” (VALKENBURG; KUBLY, 2004, p. 113), and the ecologists, which use “real-world stimuli and less controlled environments to explore higher level sensa- tion, cognition and behavior” (VALKENBURG; KUBLY, 2004, p. 113). The modality specific rifts exist because most researchers , Goiânia, v. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. 2011. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. , Goiânia, v. work with a single sensory modality, with its own theories and terminology, which may not apply to other sensory modalities. In the last twenty years a number of researchers started to recognise estudos the need to integrate the findings of different approaches, which is noticeable in studies of intersensory perception (STEIN; MER- 153 EDITH, 1993), crossmodal attention (DRIVER; SPENCE, 1998) and ecological psychoacoustics (NEUHOFF, 2004). However, there is still a long way to go, if one thinks of a largely accepted and comprehensive theory which incorporates all sensory modalities. Spatial perception is a case of crossmodal perception, which involves the use of different sensory modalities. In order to un- derstand properly the phenomenon, it is impossible to adhere to a single approach. Instead, it is important to have an open attitude, which incorporates the contributions of different approaches. In this paper, firstly, I introduce some basic concepts related to the study of perception and spatial perception, integrating informa- tion from constructivist and ecological approaches, mentioning, also, studies on multisensory integration, crossmodal attention and spatial cognition. Secondly, I discuss the possibility of conceiving space as an aural domain, including the concepts of acoustic space and aural architecture and, also, studies in human echolocation. Finally, I conclude discussing some of the broad implications of the consideration of space as an aural domain. PERCEPTION AND SPACE PERCEPTION Perception can be understood as the study of “the complete immediate relation of the organism to its surrounds” (BARTLEY, 1980, p. 11). This relationship involves both passive reception of information and active responses to the environment. These two aspects are evident in Gibson’s distinction between perception and behaviour. “Every animal”, he says, “is, in some degree at least, a perceiver and a behaver. [...] It is a perceiver of the environment and a behaver in the environment” (GIBSON, 1986, p. 8). Spatial perception involves both aspects of perception, the passive, related to the reception of information from the environment, and the ac- tive, related to locomotion and spatial navigation. The Theory of Affordances , Goiânia, v. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. 2011. 38, n. 01/03, p. 151-172, jan./mar. , Goiânia, v. Gibson proposes the concept of affordance to describe the relationship between the organism and the environment. Because each species has different sense organs and perceptual systems, estudos 154 they do not perceive the world in the same way. The theory of af- fordances describes the world as it appears for the species under consideration. In his own words: The affordances of the environment are what it offers to the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (GIBSON, 1986, p. 127). The affordances are always measured in relation to the animal, and are not conceived in absolute terms, as are the units of classical physics. A horizontal terrestrial surface, for instance, affords sup- port for a terrestrial animal, but for an aquatic animal, the support is afforded by the water surrounding its body. The most important point in the theory of affordances is that the information about the environment must be detected by the perceptual systems of the organism under consideration. Perceptual Systems Gibson (1966) also proposes the concept of perceptual system to replace the traditional concept of sense and a new typology to classify them. According to the traditional view advocated by Aristotle, there are five senses, each one corresponding to a sense organ: sight for the eye; hearing for the ear; touch for the skin; taste for the tongue and smell for the nose. This classification poses problems for the researcher, among them the exclusion of important kinds of perceptual experience, especially the proprio- ceptive, and the fact that the sense of touch does not have a single organ.
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