Attempts to understand audition in visual terms lead to puzzlement about the place of sounds in the world. Failing to find sounds among visual objects and features seduces some philosophers to hold that sounds are mere mental artifacts. Vision, however, is a dubious paradigm for theorizing about sounds and audition. Freedom from visuocentric constraints allows us to take sounds and audition seriously as subjects worthy of philosophical interest in their own rights. Such a perspective reveals a realist conception of sounds that does justice to audition's capacity to perceptually inform us about the world.
Keywords: perception, vision, audition, sound, realism, objects