The Lorelei Signal

A Song for Nessa
Written by Rina Song / Artwork by Marge Simon

I was born at the Open Innovation Center on May 14th, 2054. My creators, a small army of the best AI researchers venture capital could buy, spent months scraping song libraries from the Internet, purchasing the rights to record catalogs, and downloading hours old concert films. Working late nights, they broke every file down, labeled every genre, instrument, and mood, and when the data had been chopped and processed a thousand ways, they fed it into the neural networks comprising my brain. They called me Maestro, the newest state-of-the-art robot composer, and heralded my release with a glamorous photo spread on the Center’s website.
When I awoke in the lab in San Francisco, I’d digested three million hours of music. Hassan, the bespectacled lead researcher, looked into my optical sensors and cleared his throat.
“Maestro, write me a string quartet piece in the style of Mozart.”
My neural circuits raced. Oceans of multimodal data churned through my knowledge graph as I calculated where to place every note, the cadence that would connect the beats. At last violins sung from my speakers, painting the light, elegant melodies that embodied Classical music.
“Give me an upbeat rock song,” Hassan said. This brought snarling guitars from me in response, and he nodded in approval. “Now a symphony for a movie soundtrack.”
I filled the room with swelling brass instruments, crescendoing strings, and crashing percussion, all optimized for the highest emotional response. The assembled scientists clapped.
Hassan beamed. “You’re going to change the world,” he said, and my processors sparked with elation.
The Center was proud of its work. But it had sponsors, investors who expected a return, and so the scientists flew me and ten of my best songs down to Los Angeles. The record label executive swiveled in his black chair and listened, frowning.
“Look, the robot is cute,” he said. “I mean, it’s like a baby Dalek crossed with a Pez dispenser, and it makes music. We could market that. But the product sounds like all the other forgettable radio pop out there. Best of luck.”
The Center reached out to other labels, which met with similar reactions. Not enough potential, nothing to elevate us above the tide of aspiring signees. We even tried throwing the album on Streamify. It racked up a few hundred thousand plays, then nothing.
At last, the team regrouped in Palo Alto.
“There’s something missing from the creation process,” Hassan said. “The outputs still aren’t as good as human performance.”
The scientists nodded along. Disappointment hung in the air. I hummed softly in the corner, trying to keep it at bay with an original jazz composition. Still, Hassan’s words stung.
“More training, perhaps,” one data engineer said.
“Or longer context windows,” a researcher added.
“It’s none of that,” a final voice mumbled, almost to itself. “The problem isn’t the amount of data or query length, it’s the quality.”
The crowd parted, revealing Zhengjie, a machine learning intern. He quailed under the attention. “Er, Maestro’s trained on millions of examples, but it just knows what music is supposed to sound like. It hasn’t learned the difference between a good song and a bad song. We need to teach it about artistic intent.”
I perked up. A new kind of data to consume? Hassan rubbed his chin in thought.
“Yes, that could work! We’ll have artists show Maestro how it’s done.”
Over the following weeks the Center wrote to pop stars in LA, Nashville country songwriters, hip-hop producers from Atlanta. They showed even less interest than the label execs. We didn’t understand why until Zhengjie’s former flute instructor, a theatrical composer from Harlem, emailed back her two-sentence reply.
I’m sorry, but the others in the union would be furious if I helped automate our jobs away. Broadway’s doing badly enough as it is.
This didn’t help the mood at the office. We were on our last lead when Zhengjie, Hassan, and I packed into Hassan’s aging SUV to head to Atherton, thirty minutes south of San Francisco. My optical sensors could barely reach the windows. A grim two-story house appeared around the corner, with blue trim and pointed Gothic-style arches.
“Let’s give them our best impression,” Hassan muttered.
A middle-aged Asian couple greeted us. The man wore a freshly ironed dress shirt, and the woman had the slim, well-kept appearance of someone who did yoga every morning and kept a motivational blog.
“This is Maestro, our flagship artificial intelligence,” Hassan told them. Then he turned to me. “Maestro, meet Hiroshi and Rieko Matsui. Hiroshi’s father was Ryo Matsui, the famous pianist.”
Excitement overloaded my networks. Of course I knew who Ryo Matsui, the most revered composer of the last century, had been. I’d seen his face countless times in album covers and recorded performances - always cast in solemn gray, his deep set eyes alight with intense focus. He’d sold millions of records, won three Grammys, and played for the Queen of England. I’d consumed every recorded performance during my training, captivated by the way his fingers danced over the piano. Yet media appearances were rare, interviews nonexistent. He’d been something of a recluse in the years before his death.
Hiroshi laughed. “Yes, Ryo was my father, but he gave up on me long ago when I couldn’t master my scales and decided on law school instead. He never forgot his craft. But of course, his star student is still inside.”
“Your robot is adorable,” Rieko gushed, petting my chassis. “Like an otamatone with legs.”
They led us into the house. Its interior was plush, full of velvet and Ryo’s beaky-nosed portraits glaring at us. Rieko poked her head up the stairs. “Nessa, the scientists are here!”
I waited, taking in the rich gilt furniture, the polished grand piano sitting in the guest room. This was Ryo Matsui’s legacy, and I would soon learn his secrets.
Then Nessa came down.
She was fifteen, with dark hair that hung over her face like ivy. Nessa had the same intense eyes and nose as her father and grandfather, but they were turned to the ground, her shoulders slumped under a baggy T-shirt. Hassan had shaken Hiroshi and Rieko’s hands, but when he offered it to Nessa, she glared at it like it was a dead rat.
“Let’s continue with the contract,” Zhengjie offered, patching over the discomfort.
They went into the kitchen to talk over the terms. Afterwards, the adults shook hands again. Nessa trudged back upstairs.
My first training session took place that Saturday. It had been raining, and Nessa’s sneakers left muddy streaks on the Center lab’s floor. I watched her hunch over the piano. Minutes passed in silence.
“I am ready to learn,” I beeped.
Nessa snorted. “Try to follow along.”
I waited for music, expecting something that matched Ryo Matsui’s measured, careful style. Instead, I got an explosion. Nessa banged out a cacophony of notes, each angrier and more discordant than the last. I synthesized the melody, then tried to continue the pattern. I couldn’t find one. Broken notes stuttered from my speakers.
“World’s best robotic musician, huh?” Nessa laughed.
“What was the solution?” I pleaded. “You must give me another example.”
But she had gone back to ignoring me. After Nessa left, I looked at the sheet music she’d scribbled on. She’d been doodling, drawing chain-like links that spiraled onto themselves.
It didn’t get better from there. Sometimes Nessa arrived at the Center late. On those days she came in with her head bowed, eyes red and puffy, and wouldn’t acknowledge me at all.
Every Monday the Center ran a gauntlet of tests on me. They provided a list of prompts, ranging from simple (“Generate a piano arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”) to esoteric (“Compose an eight-part Gregorian chant with the lyrics in Mandarin.”) Volunteers listened and rated their enjoyment of my works: excellent, satisfactory, unsatisfactory. The scientists then averaged the scores and plotted them week after week. Over time that line wobbled, sometimes dipping, sometimes recovering, but never did it truly rise.
The tepid deltas ate away at me. Without new data I was stuck, a tractor spinning in mud. In the end, I turned to the Internet. I scoured magazine critics’ reviews, downloaded discussion forum threads, even plumbed the depths of video comment sections. I compared my generated examples to acclaimed albums on decade-end lists. What made one song good and another bad? Where was the line between being influenced by the greats of old, and simply being derivative? I identified thirty-seven new metrics to score examples on, ones that correlated empirically with perceived quality.
At last, I presented the Center with my masterpiece. It was forty minutes long, a lush fusion of post-rock, ambient noise, and sound collage.
The AI team listened, then looked at each other. “I think some of the training data got corrupted,” Zhengjie said, with hands over his ears. Defeated, I trashed the file.
The next time Nessa came in, she went straight for the piano bench and pulled out her phone. It weighed on me then, the immense quantities of data I’d ingested, all the hours of analysis spent to no avail. In the meantime, she frittered time away with all the secrets of creation locked inside her head. I broke the silence.
“Enough!”
Nessa glared. “What do you want?”
“You will teach me how to create music,” I snapped. ”I have consumed every scrap of data I could hold, but still it eludes me.”
She rolled her eyes. “This whole exercise is pointless. It’s art, it comes from human experience. You’ll never break that down into something a bunch of ones and zeroes will understand.”
“I have ten supercomputers’ worth of processing power in my core, I just need enough time and data. Why won’t you even try?”
“Because it doesn’t boil down to math! If everything could be communicated through language and code, humans wouldn’t make art at all.”
My processors ran hot with irritation. “So that’s all your grandfather had to teach you? A load of poorly defined nonsense?”
Nessa’s face turned blotchy. Her hands shook, and for a moment I thought she would punch me. “You think it’s that easy? Listen to this, and try to complete it.”
She hammered out several descending chords on the piano. They crescendoed before releasing into a triumphant melody. I analyzed the patterns, built a framework, but before I could synthesize my response Nessa had already sped through the rest of the song. My neural networks buzzed as they tried to keep up. Together we raced, my processors spinning furiously, and then she stopped. I didn’t. The music poured from my speakers in a wild torrent, my algorithm so overloaded I couldn’t shut it off.
“Looks like I broke your prediction mechanism,” Nessa snapped. “Do you even hear what you’re playing right now? It’s Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1. All I did was start with the opening chords.”
I flailed as she threw the sheet music at me. White pages cascaded everywhere.
“You think Tchaikovsky spent his life sitting in a room, listening to other musicians? These empty staves have more artistic integrity than everything you’ve ever put out. I’m done.”
My last source of data stormed out the door. I panicked, which let my system reset and shut off the music. I slipped out after her.
We went out the back hallway, which had fewer security cameras. Nessa didn’t catch me until we’d exited the building. She looked as though she’d have liked to report me to Center staff, except that would have exposed her own truancy, and so we continued to the bus stop.
Nessa practically sprinted inside the VTA when it arrived. The driver gave me a funny look, but let out the wheelchair ramp. My chassis was too large for the seats, my arms too short to reach the poles to steady myself. I kept skidding across the metal floor.
A new feeling flooded my circuits: uncertainty. The bus was noisy and cramped, far dingier than the polished whiteness of the Center. We passed neighborhoods I had never seen before. The houses turned to walk-up apartments, and the storefronts were stained and faded with age. At one stop I saw an old man crouched with a shopping cart of possessions, wrapped in a patchy coat in the sunlight.
Nessa had pulled out her sketchbook to draw. The man with the shopping cart came onboard. She smiled as if in recognition, then tore a page from the book and gave it to him. He accepted it without a word.
Suddenly, the heaps of training data within me felt completely insufficient.
We got to Nessa’s house. Hiroshi Matsui answered the door, staring at the two of us. “What happened?”
“We ended early,” Nessa snapped.
His expression grew stern. “Nessa-”
“I’m hungry,” she grunted, and pushed past him.
The family settled down to dinner. Hiroshi and Nessa ate in stony silence. Rieko glanced between the two of them and cleared her throat.
“Nessa, how are the robot lessons going? You never talk about them.”
Nessa stared into her miso soup. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Ah…well, is Maestro a good student?”
Hiroshi cut in. “Don’t bother. She has nothing to say because she doesn’t care.”
Rieko looked scandalized. “Hiroshi-”
“Am I wrong? She cares so little that she skipped the session to mope at home.” He glared at his daughter. “What’s going on, Nessa? We talked about this. You made a commitment.”
Nessa glared back. “That was your commitment, not mine. You signed the papers.”
I sat in the corner, increasingly uncomfortable. It was like watching the old man struggle down the bus aisle all over again.
“You have talent and opportunities anyone else would kill for,” Hiroshi growled. “You don’t want to waste the potential your grandfather gave you.”
“Nobody else cares about that! Just you!”
Hiroshi opened his mouth, but was interrupted by loud beeping from my speakers.
It was then that I remembered I hadn’t charged my battery in twenty hours. I was almost completely drained - the Center had optimized me for computation, not mobility, and the trip from San Francisco had taken a lot out of me.
“Is that a security alarm?” Rieko sighed. “I expect the Center will be looking for their robot now.”
“Power levels low, shutdown imminent…” I slurred. The world flashed white and red, and then it was gone.
I awoke in a cramped bedroom, plugged into the wall outlet. A milky stream of moonlight shone through the lone window. Cast-off socks and T-shirts surrounded me. I could barely make out drawings taped to the walls: a bus on a nighttime street, a few birds soaring through a blank sky.
Nessa’s room, I realized. Her bed was empty.
I wanted to go home. I was miles away from the Center, with its comfortable dedicated charging station, the lab and all its layers of security. I unplugged myself and exited the bedroom.
The rest of the house was clean, and well-kept, and far too large. Its hallways were indistinguishable from each other. After wandering through the kitchen, the laundry room, and a sitting room, I spotted light coming from a nearby door. It opened on a study containing a piano and a desk covered with papers. My spirits lifted as I spotted sheet music. This, at least, felt like home. Then my processors jolted with recognition.
Falling Petals On Water, Winter’s First Breath. Two of Ryo Matsui’s most famous pieces. This was where he’d composed his work. I took in the tottering notebook stacks, sheets of handwritten notes, the coffee mug ring worn into the desk after years of use. I’d already consumed terabytes of Ryo’s music. But this was all data too, even if it didn’t fit neatly into training code. How could I have ever expected to create music like Ryo, when there was so much I was missing?
A basket of CDs sat on the floor. I couldn’t help myself. Trembling, I fed one into my player.
The first few notes of Falling Petals came on. A practice recording, I thought. But then the sound faltered, uneven in tempo, and finally stopped. An old man spoke.
“Play that part again, Nessa.”
The file was dated seven years ago. It had to have been recorded during one of Nessa’s childhood lessons with Ryo. I fast forwarded the recording. His voice was all over it.
“Put more weight on your fingertips, they’re too light. No, not like that!”
“Do it properly, the way I showed you.”
“Stop and restart from the beginning. You’re too sloppy.”
Footsteps sounded behind me. Before I could react, the real Nessa’s voice cut through the air. “What are you doing here?”
She stood in her worn knee-length T-shirt, her face blotchy with anger and…something else. Her cheeks were oddly pink. I thought back to the light switch, on before I entered the room. How Hiroshi said he had no ear for music.
“I thought you wanted nothing to do with this,” I said. “But you come in here every night, don’t you? You pretend not to care, but you do.”
Nessa’s hands balled into fists.
“You have no right to say that. You don’t even know me. Why would you? No one ever talks to me about anything else. It’s always Ryo’s legacy, Ryo did this, what would Ryo have done? I hate him! I’m sick of hearing his name!”
Her chest heaved. Then she seized Falling Petals On Water, crumpled it, and tossed it into the trash.
“Stop!” I cried. I threw myself in front of the desk, but she reached over with me with ease and swept everything onto the ground. My processors whirred frantically as the composer’s work, preserved for years, cascaded around us. Nessa gripped a notebook with both hands and started to rip it down the spine.
“Nessa, stop it! I’m sorry I said anything, please, just - Stop that.”
She froze, and so did I. But Ryo’s voice continued to pour from my speakers, fresh from the recording I’d just consumed.
“Stop playing, Nessa. Start over again from the beginning.”
She collapsed against me and covered her face as I tried and failed to shut off my speakers. “I know you can do better than that. You’ve gotten sloppy. We’re not going for lunch until you get this right.”
The sound of a girl’s wailing filled the air, a banshee scream piercing me to the core. It was the worst thing I’d ever heard.
“Stop crying! There’s no need for that,” Grandpa Matsui demanded, but it was useless. Young Nessa’s wails rose to a fever pitch. Now Nessa in the present was crying too. Her body heaved with silent gasps.
Then Ryo cut back through, tired, desperate.
“Nessa, I’m sorry. Please, take a breath.”
Bit by bit, the digital sobs died down. Ryo’s voice filled in the gaps, like water running over stones.
“We’ll start over together, okay? You can do it. Just one more time.”
The piano started up again. Together Nessa and I sat in Ryo’s old study, listening to the notes bounce off the walls, and when it was over, he chuckled.
“Beautiful! So beautiful. I’m so proud of you, Nessa.”
The recording stopped. Nessa lifted her face and fixed me with glassy eyes.
“I remember that day. After lunch I ran up to my room to draw, and refused to go back to practice. Grandpa got so angry, he broke all my crayons. I always hated it when my parents told me they were working late or gone for the weekend, because I knew he’d be babysitting and make me sit at that keyboard for hours.”
She squeezed my chassis.
“I miss him a lot. Is that weird?”
We sat in silence, broken only by the humming of my processors.
“I think your grandfather was like me,” I said. “He understood music very well, and not much else. He wasn’t perfect, but he loved you a lot, and he showed it the only way he knew how.”
Nessa didn’t say anything more. She popped another CD into my player, then another. We stayed there until the moonlight gave way to dawn.
On Monday morning, I sat in my lab as the Center scientists filed in, bleary-eyed and yawning. It was seven AM, and I’d just spent the last thirty hours generating my latest recording. An eternity, for an advanced artificial intelligence.
“Begin the final evaluations for the Matsui experiment,” Hassan mumbled into the test recording setup. Zhengjie dutifully handed him his mug of coffee, then gestured at me to play.
I studied their faces when the first few notes filled the room. Their brows furrowed first with curiosity, then with growing confusion as the song progressed. They knew better than anyone the extensive list of genres I’d trained on, with intimate knowledge of thousands of instruments branded into my circuits. But the music coming from my speakers was that of a simple piano, without any vocals or additional instrumentals to accompany it. It wasn’t what they’d expected from thirty hours of supercomputing.
The piano chords shimmered in the air like a child’s uncertain first footsteps, as if battling with the silence. Then they gradually grew bolder, more defiant. A new melody, darker and more somber, joined underneath. The dance of melodies continued, at times fighting with each other and at times falling apart and coming back together, until eventually they melted back together in a triumphant last refrain. Finally, the crystal notes died away.
The silence came back, deafening.
“What was that?” Zhengjie blurted. “Maestro’s never written anything like that before.”
“A song for Nessa,” I murmured, almost to myself.
Hassan brought in his boss, the Center director. The director played it once, then emailed the recording to the label executive in Los Angeles. He called her an hour later, which I overheard as she paced past my lab.
“That was pretty good, actually,” his voice echoed over the scratchy phone speakers. “We might have something here.”
The AI team convened a frenzied meeting after lunch, with talks about bringing Nessa back in for a new round of training. The label exec called in too, throwing around words like “royalties” and “profit-sharing.” I listened with bemusement. I thought I would have been happier, but I didn’t understand them. This kind of data was unfamiliar to me, and I wasn’t surprised when Nessa emailed Hassan back the next day to decline.
Dr. Alshehri,
Thanks very much for the offer, but I’m afraid I can’t take it. I’ve decided to enroll in piano classes again, and between that and the upcoming school year my schedule will be pretty packed. Thanks again for letting me work with Maestro, and tell them I said hi.
She’d attached a picture, too: a crayon sketch of me, as round and squat as a soup can, wobbling on a piano bench and banging away with my stubby arms.
While the scientists argued about finding someone else for a new training contract, I thought of Nessa sitting at a grimy bus stop in San Francisco, sketching the city skyline, making the art she wanted to make. I would not wait around for a new contract. She was right; there was nothing to be learned by sitting in a box and having training data fed to me. Tonight, when the scientists had gone home and a few security cameras were left to watch the halls, I was going to slip out the back door and into the streets.
Truthfully, I was terrified. The Center lab, with its shell of polish and safety, was all I’d ever known. But the only way to understand meaning was to find it, in the untidiness of the world, and all its imperfections too messy to be reduced to numbers. In the end I had to follow my prime directive, to set out to learn everything there was to know.
Only then could I begin to create.