From the Star Trek ask game:
48. Name a song or music genre you think each of the la Sirena holo squad would like.
I don't really listen to a lot of music, so I can't talk too much about specific songs or 20th/21st century genres. Fortunately, this is Star Trek, so I get to be creative 😁😁😁
Emil: I mean, if you've read my fic, you know my Emil listens to all kinds of opera and likes to sing it, too! Doesn't have to be Klingon opera, either. He once spent a delightful afternooon being taught the finer points of Bynar coloratura by Xyr (the star tenor Rios hooked up with one time and whom Emil has a crush on admires).
When it's not opera, Emil probably listens to various forms of jazz, about which he has Very Strong Opinions. (Of course, he would never go so far as to, say, have a protracted argument with someone on Federation hypernet message boards about the merits of warp-shift-amplifiers on Tellarite slop jazz, but in his defense, cargo runs really do get very boring sometimes when you don't want to risk turning off and not being there when your captain gets himself shot again......)
Ian: He'd say Scottish folk music as a matter of pride, but he also unironically loves it! He has a vast repository of sheet music for historic tunes set for various instruments and always keeps an eye out for new talent from Scotland or Caldos Colony that might be worth keeping an eye on. He does play the bagpipes himself, too, though usually only when nobody from te non-holographic crew is on board. He has also been known to lead a rousing round of sea shanties every now and again.
Other than that, he also enjoys really experimental genres. There was an unfortunate incident a few months ago where Ian was listening to a new album from an underground spectral punk band while he did engine maintenance. He was sure he wouldn't be bothering anyone, because the music wasn't in the audible spectrum for humans and only Rios and Agnes were on board at the time. About twenty minutes into the record, he got a very salty message from Emil, asking him to please stop playing music that could cause crippling migraines and ruptured ear drums in his patients...
Enoch: Enoch is all for the Federation equivalent of top 40 radio. He sometimes sneaks onto the holodeck to watch concert-transmissions from the latest Andorian pop princess or Bajoran singer-songwriter. When he's sitting watch on the bridge on the rare occasions Rios is asleep (not that he needs to be there, the computer would activate him, if his services were required, but it feels right to physically keep an eye on things, you know?) he'll often tune in to the biggest music broadcasts to keep up with new music and concert dates.
Enoch also has a knack for finding the exact song, musician, or current trend that is most likely to piss off Rios and to then fall in love with it completely. He claims it's entirely coincidental, and Emil has seriously considered writing a psychology paper about this phenomenon and what it might say about the origins of musical taste and aversion. Emil and Agnes have spent many an hour sipping tea together, watching with rapt attention as Enoch and Rios yell at each other about the "Taylor Swift Revival"-Revival Band and what is or isn't sacrilege to force poor Sirena to play through her speakers. (The rumour that there was popcorn consumed with the tea is pure slander, though!)
Emmet: Emmet has the great advantage that he does not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him or his taste in music. He has had phases where he'd be listening to metal and grunge at top volume (usually only in his head, though occasionally he'd "accidentally" blast it over the ship's speakers). But he also enjoys all kinds of classical and historical music and has listened to every genre of punk known to the Federation's audio libraries.
Then there was a memorable week where he got so into Trill's childrens music that Steward had to ask Ian to block the sound files, because the inane ear worms were starting to infect the other EH's over their shared neural pathways, and Rios had threatened that the next holo humming the tune to "Where are you wriggling little worm?" would be scrubbed from the system.
But Emmet's secret joy, the music he doesn't really tell the others about or ever listens to where anyone can hear, are whale songs. He knows the songs of roughly two thousand different species, both from Earth Whales and other aquatic mammals that communicate in similar fashions. He even has a few very rare recordings of space whale calls, and nobody has dared to ask what he had to do to get his hands on those.
Steward: Steward, on the other hand, cares A Lot what people think about his musical tastes. He would like to be sohpisticated and classy, and enjoy opera and jazz as much as Emil and the captain, or have some deep cultural ties to a genre of music he enjoys, like Ian. But alas, he finds it heart to really get into any of that. He has found himself tapping his foot and nodding along to some of the catchcy stuff Enoch often puts on when Rios is asleep, but he knows that's not really dignified and worries he might seem uncultured if people know he enjoys top 40 radio.
(Raffi has called him a snob on more than one occasion, and he knows he'll have to do some deep thinking to overcome some of the biases his creators endowed him with, because he has come to realize his interpretation of "hospitality" differs quite a bit from what they seem to have been envisioning.)
He would really like to learn to play the guitar. He can play a lot of different instruments and his singing voice is exquisitely trained, but the guitar is one of those blindspots he was left with, after Rios's deletions to the holos' memories. Steward knows that Rios can play incredibly well himself and keeps a real, hand-crafted guitar in secure storage for the extremely rare occasions Rios has been in the mood to play. The EHH has dropped a lot of less-than-sublte hints around Agnes recently and hopes she might be able to coax Rios into getting back to a hobby he once loved.
Steward himself dreams of a time when they'll all be sitting around a campfire on the holodeck, or maybe in the open cargo bay with sand from the beach they landed on blowing up the loading ramp, and him playing the guitar as they all sing campfire songs and make smores and stockbrot.
Until then, he is going to make sure Sirena's access to the various Federation audio libraries is always running smoothly, the holodeck is perfectly calibrated and stocked to cater to everyone's needs, and their various music collections are kept in whatever way is most fitting to the individual crew member, holographic or otherwise. Because he is in charge of the welfare of every soul La Sirena, and if that means occasionally reassuring Emmet (or Rios) that he definitely s the only one besides Steward who knows about the collection of whale songs and reassuring him nobody will ever find out he likes to fall asleep to them, or helping Emil or Enoch workshop another fan letter or scathing blog post, or running simulations on Ian's latest music genres to make sure they won't wilt the botniculas, then that's all the music he needs.
This was fun! I was gonna apologize for the length of this, but then I doubt you mind, do you? 😁
Thank you so much for the opportunity to write about my favourite gaggle of hyper-competent idiots and their various exploits! This was a great way to do some worldbuilding and micro-fic-writing even when full ficlets seem out of reach, and I'm realy grateful for the inspiration!
If anyone else wants to know more: Send Me Star Trek Asks 💗 (Or alternatively: send me holo-asks! I'm alsways delighted to write stuff like this!)
