Daniele Cassaghi

The audio transparency thesis holds that reproduced sound can, in principle, be auditorily indistinguishable from the sound it reproduces. Although transparency is widely regarded as the aesthetic ideal of sound reproduction, most philosophers reject either the possibility or desirability of transparency. This article defends both. I argue that existing challenges to the transparency thesis rely upon two questionable assumptions. The first is that transparency requires qualitative identity of original and reproduced sonic properties. I argue, in contrast, that transparency requires only indistinguishability in auditory experience. This makes transparency compatible with distortion below audible levels, and relative to what the specified hearer(s) can distinguish in auditory experience. The second questionable assumption is that transparency is always a relation between reproduced sound and the sound of the event it originates from, such as a live musical performance. I argue instead that playback of a commercial copy of a recording can be transparent with playback of the master recording it is derived from. On this understanding, transparency is possible in principle and is defensible as the aesthetic ideal of sound reproduction because it enables the listener to hear a recording exactly as it was designed to be heard.