You don't want to read research articles; they are long, difficult, and usually misleading. Books and surveys are easier. You can evaluate the quality of a book by checking the citations: "is this book citing recent articles?" For example, I read a chapter of "An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing" and found it to be useful. I haven't seen a sufficient diversity of books to give an accurate recommendation, however. There may be better books. They'll generally look scientific and dry. For example, "This Is Your Brain on Music", a pop-sci book, will not be useful.

Surveys are where an active researcher talks about what everyone else is doing in the field, and what the important developments are perceived to be.

Experimentation: keep a global goal in mind, such as: "I want to classify all possible timbres and put them on a manifold", or "I want to understand the full mechanics of how a human turns tones into perception". Then you can try synthesizing sounds in pursuit of this goal. Right away, you will find all kinds of strange nonlinearities, and that simple models work poorly. For example, if you hold down sine tones at 400 Hz and 600 Hz, then play an 800 Hz tone, you'll note that sometimes the 800 Hz tone has an attack and sometimes doesn't; this will lead to learning about transients, place vs periodicity, FFR, ITD, and phase sensitivity of the ear. You'll also notice that there is a "click" at the beginning of each note, which will then lead you to discover gammatones, derivatives, and envelopes. This method works because whether your predictions succeed or fail, you are either learning something cool (a mistake in a model) or building something awesome (a great theory).