I’m not being ironic, to begin with: so let me tell you that how us humans perceive audio is a self explanatory phenomenon in my opinion, meaning that how we perceive it is how we perceive it…
Perception of sound is final, in a way; that, at least, in how I see it not as an AES member but as a scholar of music phenomenology. Then, just for the sake of pedantry (be patient), I’d add that discovering methods to help perception closer to reality is, to my mind, very different from helping reproduction closer to reality. Last, methods necessarily have to be reduced to a very few (industry tries incessantly to reduce them to one, making the former one redundant), while brains and minds are billions…
Interesting, there is a narrative that current recording and replay technologies and processes and the whole replay chain is so far removed from actual reality… what some call true hidefinition, that it is more about perception. There was a very interesting paper on exactly this within the AES library… I should renew by membership.
However even with emotion in music and emotion associated with sounds, there is evidence a lot of this is nurtured and not intrinsic… so it becomes more about the appreciation and perception through possible conditioning and expectation of the art form or artefact, rather than an actual concept of reality.