Listening with: Minds, machines, milieux, and music (L)

Human auditory ecology extends psychoacoustics beyond controlled stimuli to the complex realities of soundscapes, ecoacoustics, and musical practices. From Schafer's soundscape studies to ecoacoustic monitoring, researchers have shown how sonic environments reveal ecological processes and shape human perception and culture. Listening has been richly theorized across sound studies, music studies, and ecological approaches to perception, yet these perspectives remain unevenly integrated into hearing science, ecoacoustics, and computational and creative practices. In this Letter, we focus on human listening and argue that understanding it requires jointly considering four interdependent dimensions: minds (embodied perceptual and cognitive grounding), machines (technologies of capture, analysis, and transformation), milieux (ecological, cultural, and political embedding), and music (culturally organized forms of sound).