I think Peter Belt defined this genre with the colored zipties and pet rocks. It’s real, and in the studio it’s real too. If you program the participants brains, whether they are listeners or performers, they can have different perceptions of the audio performance. It is well known that big microphones give a bigger sound, for instance.
In the community noise world this plays out too. If people see a helicopter image they report hearing noise, even if there isn’t any.