The other night I had a very vivid dream about the clarinet. I haven't played the clarinet since high school, though I do still have a clarinet somewhere among my possessions.
In my dream I was at a party in the music room of my old school and I was trying to prove to a friend that I hadn't forgotten how to play the instrument, though it had been such a long time. Even though I was asleep, my fingers remembered exactly how to move.
In theory I knew what to do, though I couldn't quite tease a pleasant sound out of the thing. When I woke up this morning I immediately wanted to dig through my childhood belongings and unearth that clarinet.
Soon, however, I realised I was too lazy to do this and instead started thinking about how our brains work when it comes to music. I spent my first year of university studying music and I learnt one or two things about it.
Apparently our bodies are more likely to respond to rhythmic patterns that resemble our pulses, and we prefer key signatures without too many sharps and flats; hence the widely adored key of C major (no sharps, no flats) and its close friend A minor.
You only have to think about the plethora of pop songs in the key of C major in a four/four time signature to consider there might be some inherently natural quality to music.
And by inherently natural I mean that perhaps there is something in the human psyche that is drawn to listening to music, and to making and understanding it. Personally, I am pretty reluctant to suggest there is any universality to art.
There are always mitigating social and cultural factors that mean art produced in any capacity is going to be alienating or isolating towards certain groups of people, because it is focused on one dominant perspective.
Obviously, my own view and understanding of music is limited, because I don't know that much about it outside of a Western context.
Whether or not music as a product is universal, it seems as though music, as a process is something people in general seem to have some sort of innate understanding of.
Some people have grown up with music lessons and others haven't, but even without a base knowledge of how music works, we know what we like and what we don't like and we are moved by keys, key changes, and tonality, even if we don't technically understand what is happening.
Experiencing music is different between those who have learnt to play music and those who have not, but I wonder if those two groupings could be split any further.
Having started music lessons when I was 5 years old, I can't speak for those who haven't studied an instrument or musical theory, but I would say that everyone's experience of learning music drives them to approach music in very different ways.
For example, the first instrument I learnt was the violin, and I learnt it in a very traditional, classical setting, with a focus on reading sheet music and learning theory, while I know others who learnt entirely by ear.
Later, when I started learning to play the guitar, I realised that, as a young woman, everything surrounding the guitar was totally out of my realm of experience and I had to adjust the way that I played to a way that fit my understanding of what it was to play and learn music.
So, despite there being cultural structures surrounding music, we seem to be able to adapt quite naturally to playing music in a way that works for us.
And if we can play music and hear melodies in our sleep then it doesn't seem too unlikely that music, in its most basic form, is something our subconscious is capable of understanding outside of any pre constructed form.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
