The Sonic Loop: How Cognitive Neuroscience and Audio Engineering Can Co-Evolve

Cognitive science has historically evolved by incorporating new disciplines in response to advances in science and technology. We argue that the growing emphasis on naturalistic perception and cognition marks another such interdisciplinary moment, particularly in the auditory domain. Cognitive neuroscience and audio engineering share a common object of inquiry—sound—and a common receiver—the human auditory system—yet they have largely evolved in isolation. This separation now constrains progress in both fields. Auditory neuroscience often relies on simplified stimuli that weaken spatial and scene-level cues central to real-world hearing, while audio engineering frequently depends on industry conventions that lack grounding in neural and cognitive evidence. Building on classic work in auditory scene analysis, contemporary models of spatial hearing, and the broader rise of naturalistic paradigms in neuroscience, we propose that bridging these disciplines is not merely a technical improvement but a methodological and epistemological imperative. We introduce the sonic loop: a bidirectional framework in which spatial audio approaches, as implemented in contemporary immersive audio formats, enable technically rigorous yet ecologically valid neuroscience, while neural and behavioral data provide principled constraints for perceptually optimized audio engineering.