It is my hope that this paper has been insightful and thought-provoking – with an interdisciplinary approach between audio engineering and philosophy helping to provide significant context to some of the inner workings of audio engineering practices. Knowing that there exists a category for subjective sound qualities may not, upon its own merit, provide significant benefit to audio engineer practitioners. Yet understanding that (at least principally) we judge our practice by comparison might help us to understand that we do not value and implement certain practices in a vacuum – it is almost always possible (perhaps though difficult) to demarcate the dimension upon which we value something.

While most audio engineers may not be intimately acquainted with the ontological distinctions made within this paper, they endlessly discuss ontological abstracta (via subjective sound qualities; honk, presence, etc). Even if the category of abstracta is not agreed upon by engineers, they may find it difficult to argue with its premise; abstracta cannot be found on its own within time and space. The property sounds a bit honky cannot be found floating about, it can only be found when associated with (instantiated by) a concrete entity – sound.

On the axiological side of things, audio engineers may be the most ardent users of evaluative appraisals. For an audio engineers to complete a task in a chosen way, there must be an aspect of a given choice which is better in some dimension than its alternative (Chang 2015, p219). If two (or a range) of choices are perfectly commensurate in their perceived value, then there is likely no real reason to pick one option over another. Audio engineers then, are constantly evaluating how good/bad things are relative to their aims and – as this framework would suggest – HoP.  Additionally, for audio engineers, it is the very notion of evaluative goodness/badness (‘what could be’ or ‘what has been’) that may be the final arbiter when selecting our practices. In fairness to non-engineers, deciding between two choices is not a particularly esoteric practice. Yet within the context of this research – it seems that certain concepts within axiology and indeed ontology, may have always been tools that audio engineers apply, albeit perhaps by different labels.

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