Music has always been a problem for semiotics, to the extent that music semiotics is the most neglected of the so–called applied semiotics. The paper will first outline how music poses a number of theoretical challenges to the verbally and visually oriented semiotic episteme (especially in the Saussurean and Greimassian tradition), and give an overview of the main proposals in music semiotics that have been made over the decades. It is worth noticing how lateral authors such as Ponzio (1997), Kramer (2002), Tagg (2012), Barbieri (2020) and Ferraro (2019) attempted to reverse the perspective on the relationship between music and language; they therefore proposed not to apply semiotics to music, but to use music to rethink the foundations of semiotics. Goitre (1980) and Lidov (2004) went further and asked: “Is language a music”?The central role of three classical figures will be then emphasized, whose legacy can still be made fruitful for the semiotic study of sound and music: Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Umberto Eco (1932–2016) and Gino Stefani (1929–2019). Barthes focused on “the body of music” (“Le corps de la musique” is the title of the last section of the collection “L’Obvie et l’Obtus”, published by Seuil in 1982) and thus anticipated both sound studies and theories of embodiment. Eco laid the foundations for his theory of interpretative cooperation in experimental music (since “The Open Work”, 1962). And Stefani’s pragmatic approach is a virtuoso example of how musicology, music education, popular musicology and semiotics can work together.