Can we define music? Most of us may agree that it is bourn by a time series, jointly or independently, of amplitude, frequency and complexity, three fundamental well-known parameters used in physics. This time series is the objective reality, or the fictional reality of physics. But obviously all such time series pertaining to auditory sensation are not music. The music incorporates another kind of reality, the subjective reality of emotion, ex-pression and abstraction. These two realities together constitute the ultimate reality, a holistic reality.
The ambition of modern science, in our belief, must be to understand the causal relations in this reality. The present paradigm of science, which deals with only the objective reality, is inadequate. The rigidity of adherence to the belief that truths are only absolute and objective is the shackle that needs to be broken.
Music is one of the oldest forms of art, something to experience and enjoy. What does science have to do with this highly emotive and experiential phenomenon? Certainly it is not that of a critic. By science we naturally mean the modern science, which is of western origin, shorn of all subjectivity and is said to deal with only ‘pointer reading’. In the west the beginning of scientific thought is generally traced back to Leucippus and Democritus (5th century BC). The elements of reality were reduced to two, being and non-being, full and void, atom and space. A reality was born which was strictly and coarsely material, the subject, the "I" went out in the wilderness. This concept of science continued till the discovery of quantum theory in the 20th century. The realisation that physics has de-humanised science so much that a man has become an impotent ‘observer symbol’ started agitating the minds of scientists. Eddington observed, “..the various faculties of the observer are discarded, and even his sensory equipment is simplified, until the problem becomes such that our methods are adequate to solve..” Schroedinger was even more cryptic, “Could perhaps the declared (physical) indeterminacy allow free will to step into the gap in the way that free will determines those events which the ‘Laws of Nature’ leaves undetermined? … After the two great turning points in science in 20th century, the theory of relativity and the quantum theory, the western science still deals with only the coarsely material reality.” On this scientific view of reality, Sir James Jeans observed, “…the outstanding achievement of twentieth century physics …. is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with the ultimate reality.” Unfortunately by science we generally understand this science.
There was another science, the older science of East. This is often referred to as mysticism. This was holistic in nature combining both the experiential and experimental realities. The lack of experimental sophistication were somewhat compensated by experiential data from various natural phenomenon integrated in the thought experiments of those mystics to discover the truth. This paradigm of knowing yielded in olden times some surprising truths, which very closely conforms to the findings of modern sciences. A relevant case in point is the theory on nature and propagation of sound. Sabar Muni in 57 BC held that the air constituting physical sound means a series of conjunction and disjunction of air particles with rarefaction and condensation. Prastapada (4th century AD) described the first sound as giving of a second, the second a third and so on expanding akasa in the same way as wave propagates themselves as water (bichitaranganyaya). Udyoktakara in 6th century AD opined that the first sound created gave of not one sound in a circle but an infinite number of sounds in all directions (kadambakorakanyaya). Each of these again gives of another set of sounds in all directions (compare Huyghen’s principle). The Nyaya thinkers consider each sound wave is destroyed by its successor (compare Fresnel’s correction 1815 AD).
To our mind it is this ultimate reality where science of music should and must graze. The formation of a linkage between the natural processes of progress from sensory perception to concept formation inherent in human mind is to be included in the scheme of science. It is useful to recollect here the caution given by Pauli “ …. pure logic is fundamentally incapable of constructing such a linkage. …., the relation between sense perception and Idea remains a congruence of the fact that both the soul and what is known as perception are subject to an order objectively conceived.” This is the real challenge of science in music.
In the early days of modern science, before the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the scientific research on music remained primarily involved in physics of sound and vibration. The cognitive and experiential aspects of music were not taken note of. It is only after the emergence of the subject artificial intelligence the cognitive aspects of music are slowly being taken up into the ambit of scientific research.
Music is 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 fundamental and universal phenomena. In music one gets some message even if he is not conversant with the musical language of the performer.
Indian music is melodic in structure. Vaditya plays the most important role in Indian music. The closest objective correlate to this subjective concept is consonance. A pure tone is the sound generated by a simple vibrating tuning fork. A musical tone is composed of a large number of pure tones. Of these the one having the lowest frequency is called the pitch. The higher ones, which have frequencies integral multiple of pitch, are called upper partials or partials. Two musical tones are objectively said to be consonant if some of the upper partials of one tone match exactly with some of those of the other tone. Up to this it is perfectly objective. When we say that such tones when sounded together appear to us as musical the subjectivity comes in. Thus analysis of vaditya becomes a holistic problem while analysis of consonance remains a pure objective problem. In Western music this consonance is chordal, i.e. they refer to two or more sounds played simultaneously. They exist in same time frame and interact physically. In Indian music this consonance has a melodic and virtual existence. Here consonance occurs between a real sound and a virtual sound. For example in the case of two consecutive notes the partials of the first note imprints a pattern in the auditory cortex. The second note appears before the imprints of the first note die out. The partial matching has therefore a virtual existence in the domain of cognition. This is vaditya of Indian music.
The analysis of vaditya led to the postulate of a psycho-acoustical theory for the musical scale including the course of development and the present status of shrutis.

Last Sunday at about 4.00 PM in the afternoon, I was sitting beside my window in my room, it was silence everywhere and I was enjoying the serenity and isolation. The distant silence before the thunderstorm started to give me a feeling of excitement and immeasurable peace. Suddenly the sky was overcast with black thunderous clouds and lightning started flashing, strong winds started to blow. A breeze flew through my hair and small rain drops landed on my eyelids. I was watching the rains, the raindrops falling on the tin roof top beside my room with pitter –patter sounds. I sat all along alone in my room beside the window and watched the beauty of the nature. The acoustics of the rain created the ambience of magical moments and rhythmic melody. For time being I forgot where I am, who I am and I could imagine that lush green, breathtakingly brilliant green, hurt my eyes a green landscape, those heavily overcast skies, that distant roll of thunder, and the glamorous flash of lightening, that heady fragrance in the air, that quiet stillness which speaks of the raging storm, the breeze sometimes gentle sometimes wild ---when nature herself sings malhar, what chance do we have to resist, to meditate, to reflect! …..

The other day I was reading a short story where the author mentions about a small child living in a joint family. The child is growing amidst the day to day hassles of a Bengali upper middle class family. He sees and hears everything… the ego clash between his parents, the problem faced by his mother due to the ignorance of her maid, he also experiences his father telling lies to his friends on several occasions, he feels bad regarding the ignorance of his elders which he himself knows. One day his uncle tells him that “don’t try to rectify your elders when they are talking among themselves.. don’t try to point out the truth when you find that one of your elder is lying to another elder…you will know all these things when you will be older”. After some days his mother finds in his copy he has written all these things and prayed that he wants to remain a child and doesn’t want to become older. He is happy to remain a child….
I think this is the experience of most children in this era of globalization and all of us should think about it.

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.