A scientific understanding of music must begin by taking into account how minds act in the ambience of music. Music like speech is also a mode of communication between human beings. The communicator endeavors to communicate certain messages, be it mood, feelings, ex-pression and the like. Through this he creates a story, a sort of ambience for the audience. In a sense music appears to be a more fundamental and universal phenomena than speech. In speech communication the listener has to know the language of the speaker to get the message. In creating music an artist produces an objective material called sound. The most interesting point to note is that this sound contains only about 40% of the content of the music. The objective contents are embedded in fundamental frequency, amplitude, complexity and duration. The other 60%, called semiotics, reside in the mind of the listener. The semiotics in music consists of lexicon (chalan, pakad), syntax (raga), pragmatics (thaat, gharana) and semantics (mood, feeling, emotion). Thus if science has to probe music it has to take into account these semiotics, the cognitive processes taking place in the mind along with the acoustics of it. As in the case of a language, the semiotics here also is completely language-dependent. This needs to be borne in mind when one takes up a particular music for study. A comprehensive scientific approach therefore needs to address the physical reality of acoustics and the mental realities of semiotics. In Indian music this approach needs to have a dimension somewhat different from that obtainable for western music.