All in the audio folia is a good object of study for sociology, psychology see psychiatry.
Indeed. There is a term for this folie a million (widespread delusional beliefs). But alas the widespread belief in superstitious suppositions allows one to wiggle off the hook. I think there is one net that might hook more than a few, and that is as a process addiction. Like sex and gambling whenever the pursuit of a goal becomes so intense as to exclude interest in other areas of life or becomes an inordinate drain on finances, it has a legitimate claim to addiction. One of the leading thinkers in the psychology of addiction Gabor Maté admits to a CD buying addiction. While it might seem silly, he is convinced and cites examples on his TED talks of the destructive effects of classical music acquisition.
The people I know in psychoacoustics are most definitely NOT in social sciences. They are looking at biological mechanisms, neurology, learning mechanisms, etc. That the results is not yes/no does not make it a social science.
Whoa. Psychophysics is most definitely a branch of psychology, and psychoacoustics is a field within psychophysics. I would further claim scientists such as Weber, Fechner and Helmholtz were indeed practicing psychology--by applying physics to psychology in an effort to understand how reality is encoded by the brain. After all we are talking about
perception which is a major focus of psychology. Helmholtz BTW made lasting contributions to both vision and audition. Similarly, Ernest Mach, the physicist of speed of sound fame also studied psychophyics and was the first to use the term,
gestalt, which is one term that thankfully the fuzzy reality folk haven't absconded in defense of the inaudible--oh wait there is PRAT which comes damn close.
But I would agree that it is a field where cross-pollination is the norm--there is lots of high level mathematics, physics, and information science converging in ultimately an effort to understand and perhaps even artificially create consciousness in within cognitive science, also a ranch of psychology. As an example many of the algorithms devoted to artificial vision were developed with a knowledge of how the retina processes visual information (edge detection, contrast enhancement, hierarchical processing, etc). Improving audio is ultimately an effort to improve psychological satisfaction. That practitioners use microphones or employ Fourier and Laplace transforms is quite beside the point, and is likely a bias against the social sciences as being squishy or something akin. An example is the application of cable theory to axonal transmission of electrical impulses. One could argue that Hodgkin and Huxley were first and foremost physiologists (more specifically biophysicists) but fact remains is they were studying brain cells.