From Predefined Auditory Stimuli to Brain-Guided Generative Auditory Neuroscience

Auditory cognitive neuroscience has moved from controlled sounds toward increasingly complex stimuli, but the choice of what sounds to test remains largely determined before neural responses are observed. A complementary experimental logic is emerging, in which neural responses are used not only to evaluate predefined stimuli but also to guide the generation and selection of subsequent stimuli. Here, we articulate a perspective on brain-guided generative auditory neuroscience, in which human neural responses are related to manipulable auditory representations to establish brain–sound relationships that guide which stimuli are generated or selected for subsequent testing. This framework enables the investigation of auditory structures that may not be specified in advance, including response-relevant stimulus organization, representational boundaries, contextual dependencies, and individual- or state-dependent brain–sound variation. We further discuss technical routes for establishing brain–sound relationships and using them to guide stimulus generation, as well as how iterative cycles of generation and human testing can progressively refine these relationships through recursive brain–sound inference. The value of this approach depends not on producing unusual sounds, but on whether brain-derived guidance yields reproducible insights beyond predefined or non-neural alternatives.