Thanks. I don't actually know all that much about it -- I'm more of just a music listener and lifelong avocational musician, but I'm learning a bunch about it now.
It's kind of the frontier in audio that we listener types, not audio practitioners, don't really think enough about from an actual scientific perspective or perspective of our clinical knowledge, but it's where the rubber hits the road so to speak in audio for music listening, because, of course, we're not building or buying or using measuring devices for sound, but equipment for listening to music with.
Acousticians think about it. People working in audio issues in the areas of hearing aids and cochlear implants think about it. People working in the study of language and speech and hearing disorders think about it. Engineers working in areas from audio VR and perceptual data coding and the like think about it. But we audiophiles only kind of think about it to the extent that we can either wield it as a cudgel ("that's just subjectivist nonsense, you can't be hearing that") or use it as a kind of shield ("well, what I hear, so that's all there is to it") in a 60-year-old cycle of audiophile-on-audiophile "subjectivist vs. objectivist" violence that doesn't further anyone's useful knowledge or understanding of things that really matter in audio -- which involve both what audio equipment does but also how we hear and how we perceive.
As a layperson who grew up with basic colloquial knowledge of how hearing works, I've been amazed to learn so many things that you just never learn in that context -- like about the descending auditory pathway from the brain to the inner ear in the kind of active feedback loop between brain and ear in our hearing that not only creates a system of sort of active gain reduction in the ear and impacts frequency selectivity and is at least to some degree plastic, so it can differ from person to person and be changed by learning and experience.
I also just find the science of perception damn interesting!
Seems like I'm not alone, because in recent years there's been kind of a mini explosion of music professionals turned neuroscientists studying music and audio and sound and perception, lots of them coming out of McGill, like Daniel Levitin, Susan Rogers (who was Prince's recording engineer before getting her PhD under Levitin and Stephen McAdams at McGill and who is now the director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory), and that's in addition to all the work from scientists who took a more conventional path like Nina Kraus at Northwestern, or Seth Horowitz of The Engine Institute which works at the intersection of perception science and the arts.
Anyway, I've lurked here for a long time, but I thought, given the interest of members here in audio science, some folks might also be as interested as I am in kind of the "last mile" of audio science -- the science of auditory perception.
