10.1 Reframing Sound Practice
This study set out from a specific, long-term sound practice, microtonal composition combined with structured delay and reverberation in immersive studio and installation environments, and asked what that practice is actually doing to a listener’s perceptual organization. The answer proposed here is structural, not mystical: it proposes that this practice redistributes predictive precision away from sharply bounded events and toward sustained perceptual continuity, along three axes that can each be related, with the specific caveats stated where each was introduced, to documented mechanisms in the predictive processing literature.
Reframing sound practice in these terms does not diminish it. It gives a practitioner-developed body of work a precise, falsifiable vocabulary and a set of concrete points of contact with auditory neuroscience, music cognition, and acoustics, the vocabulary developed across this paper’s three central axes, formalized in Section 6, bounded honestly in Section 7, and extended toward collaboration in Section 9.
10.2 From Personal Practice to Conceptual Proposal
The Perceptual Attenuation Field is, at this stage, a conceptual proposal built from practice and grounded in adjacent, converging evidence: precision-weighted prediction (Friston, 2010; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Parr, Pezzulo, & Friston, 2022), the predictive coding of music and its necessary cross-cultural correction (Koelsch, Vuust, & Friston, 2019; Vuust, Heggli, Friston, & Kringelbach, 2022; Savage & Fujii, 2022), tonal-uncertainty and precision redistribution (Quiroga-Martinez et al., 2019; Mencke et al., 2019, 2021, 2022; Loui, Wessel, & Hudson Kam, 2010), source-environment separation and its limits (Ivanov et al., 2022; Traer & McDermott, 2016), the precedence effect (Litovsky et al., 1999; Li, Auksztulewicz, Chan, Mishra, & Schnupp, 2022), the two-mechanism account of sensory attenuation (Kiepe, Kraus, & Hesselmann, 2021), event segmentation theory (Zacks et al., 2007), and the entrainment and absorption literatures that describe how listeners engage with sustained, uncertain acoustic material (Large, Roman, Kim, Cannon, Pazdera, Trainor, Rinzel, & Bose, 2023; Kaya, Kotz, & Henry, 2023; Vroegh, 2019).
It is not, and does not claim to be, a validated scientific theory of an integrated mechanism. The formal definition offered in Section 6.6 is precise enough to generate a specific, directional prediction, and Section 6.7’s superadditivity criterion, restated as the lead question in Section 7.4, is what testing the model’s central claim would actually require. That is the deliberate shape of a conceptual proposal built to invite empirical scrutiny rather than to avoid it.
10.3 Final Remarks on Scientific Humility
Scientific humility, correctly understood, is not the repeated disclaiming of one’s own argument. It is the discipline of stating precisely what a model claims, what it borrows from elsewhere, and what remains to be tested, once, clearly, and without either overclaiming or retreating from the claim’s substance. Bowers and Davis (2012) showed how easily predictive and Bayesian frameworks can drift into unfalsifiable narrative if that discipline is dropped; Griffiths, Chater, Norris, and Pouget (2012) showed that the same frameworks retain real explanatory force when it is kept.
This paper has tried to keep that discipline throughout: each of the three axes of the Perceptual Attenuation Field is tied to specific, citable findings, with the scope and limits of each stated where that axis was introduced rather than folded into a single blanket claim; the integrated field itself is explicitly marked as untested; and Section 6.7’s superadditivity criterion, restated in Section 7.4, gives the model a concrete way to fail. Acoustic architecture, understood as predictive ecology, is offered here as a model worth testing, not as a conclusion already reached.