(Jennifer Marie Brissett, 2015)
My existence began in an organic soup of protein and integrated circuitry chips, swirling to form a harmony of life and machine. I remember hanging in my gestation sack, lined up in a room full others doing the same, when I heard sound for the first time. A single drip. I, of course, had no idea what it was. So I looked all around, for I had been able to see for many days by this time, but sound . . . sound was new….
I listened for hours, maybe days, inventing in my mind alternate reflections to the constant pattern of the eventual pa-lunk of the drips and the momentary pauses between each falling dot. I didn’t know it then, but I eventually learned that this rhythm and the empty silences that followed were my first exposure to music….
[later on]
So that night, after the crew had finished consuming their protein rations, I played a series of acoustic waves from my subprocessor for them. I designed a composition by sampling some harmonics to mimic rain patterns, the drips of falling water. The crew remained remarkably still after I completed my piece. I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I saw that one or two of them were weeping. They clapped their hands to my relief and many of them told me that what I had played was good.
In the best-known tales of Orpheus, this mythic musician perfects the lyre of the god Apollo, moves wild beasts, trees and even rocks with his songs, and nearly rescues his beloved Eurydice from the underworld through his musical persuasion of Hades (if only he had not looked back as they ascended to the land of the living). Lesser known is the tale of Orpheus’s demise: he was torn apart by women followers of Dionysus, who left his lyre and severed head to float down a river, still singing sad songs.
Jennifer Marie Brissett’s “A Song For You” is a reimagining of Orpheus and his post-mortem fate. As she explains, the story sprang from her thought, “What if Orpheus was an android?” Her short story starts with the android head being deposited on a river shore and found by a child, who hears it singing and runs to the spot. The head then tells its life story to the child, including its discovery of music recounted in the excerpts above. To the imaginary musical instruments of Orpheus’s lyre and voice furnished by Greek mythology, Brissett’s “A Song For You” adds android-Orpheus and places it in the liminal space between made object and autonomous being with subjective experience – between instrument and musician.
Text: Jennifer Marie Brissett, “A Song for You” in Terraform, ed. Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans (Vice Media, 2022)
Image: Jean Delville, “The Death of Orpheus” (1893)