A strong hermeneutical tradition insists that - in the relationship between human beings and artworks - there are aspects that are not liable to rational explanations, such as those that apply for instance to physical processes, geological sections, symptoms of disease. This peculiar character of the artistic works would have become even more evident with the emergence of abstractionism and – as far as theatre - with the progressive departure from text and the programmatic renunciation of representing something. In this work - after discussing the limits of psychoanalytic and semiological tools - I try to show the usefulness of cognitive sciences and today's theories of human communication in dealing with that problem, with reference to an emblematic case of "messages without meanings": pure (musical) sounds.
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