“One can learn to sing in a way that can kill or heal. A song can invoke a miracle, especially if the purpose is noble and true. But few will fail to be warped by their attempt to learn such ways, because exposure to power changes the human spirit.

This is particularly clear in your own people, who use machines to kill or heal. Their spirits have become like their machines, and so, too, their expectations. But living beings are not mechanical.

Songs are cleaner. You might think machines are better, because they may sometimes heal people songs won’t heal. You presume that the proper course for all disease is resolution in healing and health. This is simply wrong. We can sing songs that will heal people that neither your medicines nor your machines could save. And there’s no expense. No poison. No death.

Now, the point is this. You can do almost anything with singing, unless you have machines instead. Once you have machines instead, you better hope they can do what you need, because you won’t have any singers, and the songs will all be hiding.

Worse still, as you are not machines, you will hate being healed by them, even when they succeed. And you will serve them, at least to the degree they appear to serve you. All of this is like the disease you are trying to cure. You have made a disease of curing, because you are so ‘advanced’ that you think song is a mode of entertainment.”

— an anonymous informant