Casey O'Callaghan's Beyond Vision—an aptly titled collection of eight previously published essays—has three central themes: (1) an adequate theory of audition needs to go beyond vision, (2) an adequate theory of perception needs to go beyond vision, and, indeed, (3) an adequate theory of vision needs to go beyond vision. Going ‘beyond vision’ requires resisting the historically dominant theoretical approach to perception in which vision goes proxy for other individual sensory modalities and for perception as a whole. Dubbed ‘the tyranny of the visual,’ this approach leads to: (1) obscuring the essentially temporal nature of auditory objects, (2) viewing perceptual experience as little more than the sum of unimodal perceptual parts, and (3) viewing multimodal aspects of visual experience as exceptional rather than expected. An additional theme, addressed in chapter 6, concerns the audition of speech sounds and argues that meanings are not among the properties of speech that...
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