Music has throughout the ages been used for prayer, devotional purposes, healing and meditation. It has been used as the universal language conveying emotions and as a vehicle of human feeling representing the mood of the human mind.

Indian music is so ancient that the point of it's creation still to this day cannot be traced. The Puraanas, the Hindu religious scriptures, refer to music and therefore it can be said that music existed at 1000 B.C. Musical instruments have been depicted by many Indian gods and goddesses, for example, Sarawati holds a Veenaa (a string instrument like the Sitar), sage Naarada holds a Naarada Veenaa, Shankar hold the Damaru drum, and Vishnu hold a conch shell. This shows that there has been a musical awareness in the ancient Indian culture.

This musical awareness may have come from man being inspired by his surrounding. This had led to arts such as painting, from seeing beautiful scenes with their shadows and perspectives, shapes in stones had led to the creation of sculpting. Man also became aware of the sonic environment around him and on hearing the songs of the birds, the buzzing of the bee and many other sounds, man began to imitate these sounds and over time this developed into music.