SONG: “The Elephant”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: BBC 28 Feb 2023, “Kerala: India temple replaces elephant with robot for rituals,” as used in the post “Kerala temple introduces a robot ritual elephant.”
ABSTRACT:
I suppose this song grew out of the penitential cover I was working on from before I missed last month’s song. At least, it uses some of the same instrument tracks and effects: sampled rock drums, a ring modulator, some reverb and chorus settings, a couple virtual amps. It also grew out of an older song I recorded here, “Electric Wind,” which (like this one) was mostly built out of multiple bass tracks and a harmonica solo. Listening to old projects sometimes makes it easier to make new ones. Sometimes it throws up obstacles – like getting earwormed by some other song; it’s hard to not just write the same thing over again.
This is a different song. For one thing, it’s got an actual guitar in it (with a lot of effects to make it sound like soft metal pulled into wire, or like a gear bending under great pressure). For another, I couldn’t find my harmonica – it’s not where it belongs, and I have a hunch one child or another (grown or otherwise) played with the damn thing and then left it where someone else tidied it somewhere mysterious to me. Anyway, the harmonica solo is actually a Chrometta, a chromatic harmonica, the kind with the little lever on the side that moves all the notes a half-step off so you can play every note in an octave, not just the ones in a particular scale. It’s a little hard to play once you’re used to a regular harmonica – the pattern of inhale notes and exhale notes is different, and you can hear one misstep right near the end where I hit the lever at the wrong point. It’s not a jarring dissonance, so I left it in. In general, it got the mournful, brassy sound I wanted. It is in some way the lament of the chained robot elephant, or the ghost of the real chained elephant living on in the robot elephant.
Because that’s what this song is about. It’s about a robot replacing an animal whose job it was to be worshiped, which meant its job was to suffer. It’s also about the widespread sense I’m picking up on that the Turing Test is about to be passed by one machine or another, or at least that everyone thinks we’re about to program a computer that can fool most people most of the time into thinking that’s it’s another person too. The thing that is being unspoken in all this anticipation is the spiritual dimension, the idea that this process is pushing up against what personhood means, what it might mean to create a soul. Computer scientists should maybe be asking some religious and philosophical questions. The robot elephant is just the beginning.
LYRICS:
The animal is not my idea of an animal
I am not an idea of me
And when I pray, it’s like I’m thinking
But what I think I do not see.The elephant is worshipped
The elephant is chained
The elephant is a machine
The elephant is a machineTwo guys talking in the temple
Counting beads and spinning wheels
Two guys kneeling at the altar
Each thinks the other guy sounds realThe elephant is worshipped
The elephant is chained
The elephant is a machine
The elephant is a machine