Sound as a Therapeutic Space: What Virtual Audio Can and Cannot Do for Anxiety

When the ambient noise of a workday becomes intolerable, most people reach for headphones. What they are reaching for, underneath the Spotify playlist or the brown-noise generator, is a reconstituted sense of place. The 2025 ACM study Sonora: Human-AI Co-Creation of 3D Audio Worlds and Its Impact on Anxiety and Cognitive Load gives that instinct some empirical weight.¹ Sonora lets users assemble personalized three-dimensional soundscapes through natural-language requests and iterative co-creation. The study found a statistically measurable drop in state anxiety among users, a reduction in cognitive load, and — crucially — that anxious users generated more requests to Sonora than calmer ones.

What the data actually shows

Higher baseline anxiety predicts more active engagement with Sonora: individuals experiencing elevated stress are actively recruiting an external tool to regulate their internal state. The cognitive-load finding is equally specific. Three-dimensional audio environments, unlike flat stereo playback, free up attentional resources rather than consuming them. When the acoustic surround is spatially organized, the brain's orientation system has less work to do. A well-designed soundscape pre-answers the environment's implicit question — is there anything here that needs your attention? — and the structured answer of no returns cognitive bandwidth to the task at hand.

The strongest use cases follow directly: knowledge workers who need focused attention but cannot control ambient noise, students in shared housing, therapists designing waiting-room environments, retreat directors setting acoustic conditions for silent prayer. The AI co-creation feature matters here because a tool that responds to verbal requests and iterates with the user is more likely to match the user's actual attentional needs than a pre-packaged playlist.

The concern that the data does not resolve

Sonora demonstrably reduces state anxiety — the acute, situational kind. Its effect on trait anxiety, the dispositional pattern of threat-detection that shapes a person's entire relationship with the world, is an open question, and it is the more important one.

Steven Hayes, whose Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has shaped a generation of anxiety researchers, identifies the core problem: when anxiety-reduction becomes the explicit goal, the entire moment organizes itself around the anxiety.² What ACT recommends instead is values-based attentional flexibility — the capacity to feel anxious and still move toward what matters. Any tool that reliably reduces state anxiety risks training the nervous system to treat anxiety-free states as the precondition for functioning, rather than developing functioning-in-the-presence-of-anxiety as itself a learnable skill.

From a Thomistic standpoint, the same concern appears in different vocabulary. Aquinas distinguishes the passions — fear, sorrow, desire — from the disordered relationship to those passions that constitutes vice. The passions are not enemies of reason; they are its instruments when properly ordered.³ Benjamin Suazo's argues that the cogitative sense is trained by repeated encounters with reality, not by the elimination of threatening stimuli from one's acoustic environment.⁴ A technology that consistently circumvents anxiety rather than educating the affective response to it is doing something different from what virtue formation requires.

Practical recommendations

Whether virtual audio supports flourishing or subtly impedes it usually comes down to how it is used.

Use virtual audio to enable presence, not to avoid it. The legitimate use case is acoustic scaffolding for attention — creating conditions under which a person can engage with a task, conversation, or prayer that environmental noise would otherwise disrupt. The criterion is whether the soundscape is a condition for engagement or a substitute for it.

Build in deliberate transitions toward unstructured sound. Regular use should not produce environments in which managed audio becomes the only condition under which a person can focus. Periodic practice in imperfect acoustic conditions keeps the attentional system resilient across a wider range of circumstances.

Distinguish therapeutic use from formation use. For someone in an acute phase of anxiety, state-anxiety reduction is a genuine therapeutic goal, and Sonora-style tools are potentially useful clinical adjuncts. For someone in a stable state trying to grow in psychological flexibility, the calculus is different.

Attend to the co-creation process itself. When a user articulates in words what acoustic environment they need, they are doing something cognitively valuable: attending to their internal state and translating it into an external request. This is a mild form of emotional granularity — the capacity to name one's internal states precisely.⁵ The co-creation process may matter as much as the output, and clinicians and spiritual directors designing environments for those in their care should weight it accordingly.

A note on the broader question

The Sonora study cannot tell us whether users who rely on virtual audio for daily regulation are building or depleting their capacity to function without it. That question requires longitudinal data that does not yet exist, and it is the question that should shape future research and current clinical practice. Virtual audio is an acoustic tool whose effects depend largely on the intentions and habits of the person using it. That phenomenological power is what makes it potentially useful, and what makes deliberateness in its use genuinely matter.

¹ De La Torre, M., Hernandez, J., Wilson, A., et al. (2025). Sonora: Human-AI co-creation of 3D audio worlds and its impact on anxiety and cognitive load. ACM.

² Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

³ Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work completed c. 1274), I-II, qq. 22–48.

⁴ Suazo, B. (2020). The cogitative sense and emotional appraisal in Thomistic psychology. Unpublished manuscript.

⁵ Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708