AES Europe 2026

Soundscapes; sonic atmospheres are often approached as
environmental conditions perceived; evaluated through
their acoustic properties; affective qualities. Recent
predictive; inferential accounts of perception, however,
suggest a different understanding: that perception operates
as an anticipatory process in which sensory input is
primarily used to minimise error in an ongoing predictive
model of the world, rather than to construct experience
from the bottom up. From this perspective, auditory
perception is an active, temporally extended process shaped
by expectation, memory, attention,; action.

This paper explores what such a predictive understanding
contributes to the study of everyday sonic atmospheres.
Drawing on predictive processing as a conceptual
framework—while acknowledging its contested status—the
paper situates auditory perception alongside other sensory
modalities as part of a broader inferential engagement with
environments. Classical auditory phenomena; longer-term
perceptual “illusions” motivate this reframing by
highlighting how expectations shape experience across
multiple timescales.
The main analytical focus is the case of transitioning from
one atmosphere to another. Atmospheres are approached here
as multimodal, quasi-objective phenomena that do not reside
in sound, space, or subjects alone, but emerge through
shared, situated engagement. Transitions foreground this
process by exposing how expectations, attentional
strategies,; perceptual norms are recalibrated over
time. From a predictive perspective, atmospheres are
constituted through collective anticipatory activity, in
which agents continuously negotiate environmental cues;
affordances across sensory modalities. Attunement is thus
understood as a temporally extended, socially coordinated
process shaped by prior experience; anticipated action.
By analysing atmospheric transitions through a predictive
lens, the paper argues that sonic atmospheres can be
understood as dynamically constituted; reconfigurable
achievements. This reframing challenges object-centred or
purely subjective accounts of atmospheres; opens new
ways of thinking about how sonic environments are shaped,
staged,; transformed in everyday life.