Auditory Intelligence: Understanding the World Through Sound

Abstract

Recent progress in auditory intelligence has yielded high-performing systems for sound event detection (SED), acoustic scene classification (ASC), automated audio captioning (AAC), and audio question answering (AQA). Yet these tasks remain largely constrained to surface-level recognition-capturing what happened but not why, what it implies, or how it unfolds in context. I propose a conceptual reframing of auditory intelligence as a layered, situated process that encompasses perception, reasoning, and interaction. To instantiate this view, I introduce four cognitively inspired task paradigms-ASPIRE, SODA, AUX, and AUGMENT-those structure auditory understanding across time-frequency pattern captioning, hierarchical event/scene description, causal explanation, and goal-driven interpretation, respectively. Together, these paradigms provide a roadmap toward more generalizable, explainable, and human-aligned auditory intelligence, and are intended to catalyze a broader discussion of what it means for machines to understand sound.