Sound box: the black box of sound perception and the methodological limits of semiotics

Abstract

The essay investigates the usefulness for semiotic disciplines of comparing its heuristic results with those of the scientific and experimental disciplines, without exceeding its theoretical limits. The starting point comes from the affirmation of U. Eco about the opportunity for semiologists to “do not poke their noses into the black box of mind or brain processes”. As a boundary matter on which semiotics is confronted with other disciplines, is then examined the issue of perception, particularly the auditory one, taking into account some explanatory models proposed around cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Specifically, a brief analysis of the problems related to the perceptual recognition of sound is performed, compared to the visual, focusing the attention, also through textual examples, on the role of sound in the audiovisual language. Among auditory perception description models, here are mentioned the “Auditory Scene Analysis” by A. Bregman, and theories related to the “auditory object”, highlighting similarities and divergences with respect to how Eco considers the problem of perception.