Part of the Applied Worldbuilding Series
Boris Volorsky has been teaching piano since before Arseny was born.
He started at six, the way a lot of things in Boris's life started — not because someone decided it was time, but because Boris decided it was time. His maternal grandmother was the one who sat him down at the piano. She had been a cook in the Kremlin for years — the kind of person who knew exactly what she was doing in any domain she chose to inhabit — and she lived with the family in their three-room Moscow apartment along with Boris's grandfather, his parents, and the five younger siblings Boris was helping to raise. She was patient and she was firm and she had high expectations, in the way that perfectionists who are also good teachers always do: she did not rush, but she did not lower the bar either. Boris was the eldest child and the eldest grandchild, and the pressure that came with that position came from both directions — parents and grandparents alike — in a household where his mother Krystal was also a natural perfectionist, cut from the same cloth as her own mother. He learned to meet the standard. He learned that meeting the standard was the point. By the time the household could afford proper teachers, he was ready for them. One teacher after another, each one finding a student who had already been taught to pay attention. By the time he was doing his Biology PhD — taking the Music Minor at the same time, in the specific way Boris does things, which is to do two demanding things simultaneously and treat this as normal — he had the kind of fluency at the keys that takes a decade to build and can't be taught in the way it was learned — only in the way Boris teaches it now, which is in the living room of a Large Grade II penthouse in Brighton Beach, to whatever child or adult is sitting next to him on the bench.
All eight Volorsky children have sat on that bench. Dimitri, Vladimir, Eugini, Arseny, Ilariy, Natasha, Alisa, Sergei — in that order, each arriving on the bench at their own moment and taking from it what they were ready to take.
Arseny has sat there the most. This is partly because Arseny has the particular brand of musical restlessness that keeps pulling you back to the instrument even when practice feels tedious, and partly because Boris recognizes in his fourth son something he recognizes in himself: the experience of music as a way of thinking, not just a skill set. The others are good. Arseny is the one who kept going.
By his early twenties, Arseny plays keyboard regularly with a small group of friends — a rotating cast of people who care about music the way some people care about cooking: not as a career, not as a performance, but as something you do together because it makes the evening good. They meet mostly next door.
The apartment next door is Lenny Leontin's.
Lenny is a Leonite. Giant Grade II, like his youngest brother Marshal, who is thirteen and has been on the football team with Sergei since they were ten. The Leontin family has nine children and one of the largest apartments in the Brighton Beach Oceana complex — Giant Grade II scale, which means doorways that actually fit a full-grown Leonite in a winter coat, ceilings that give the room the natural resonance of a space built for people who carry a certain amount of physical presence. It is a considerably larger room than the Volorsky penthouse next door, and it sounds different. This matters more than it sounds like it would.
Arseny brings his keyboard over when they meet. The keyboard is a mid-range digital instrument sized, like most consumer instruments, for Medium or Large Grade players — which means its keys are sized for Arseny's Lupenite hands, its action calibrated for Lupenite finger weight, and it sits on a stand adjusted to a height that makes sense for someone of Arseny's build. When Lenny plays it, he adjusts. Giant Grade II hands on Large Grade I keys is workable, the way a right-handed person can write with their left — not impossible, just not the native idiom. Lenny manages.
What Lenny plays when he's playing the right instrument is bass — upright, specifically, a Giant Grade II instrument that he has owned since he was sixteen and that lives in the corner of his apartment like a piece of furniture that happens to make sound. The scale between the notes is proportional to his hands. The body of the instrument reaches to his chest rather than his chin. When he draws the bow or plucks the strings, the sound is not just loud in the way that all bass instruments are loud. It carries the particular resonance of a Giant Grade II body in a Giant Grade II room, and it is, to everyone who has ever heard it, the reason the group sounds the way it does.
Here is the design question that most worldbuilders skip over when they put musical instruments in a multi-species world.
They skip it because instrument sizes seem like a logistics problem — make the guitar bigger, done — and logistics problems are boring, so they don't engage with them, and because they don't engage with them they miss what's actually interesting about the question. The interesting thing is not that instruments come in different sizes. The interesting thing is what size does to sound.
An instrument is not just a machine for producing notes. It is an acoustic object that produces notes by exploiting resonance — the way its body, its strings or pipes or membranes, interacts with the physical space it inhabits. A smaller instrument produces higher resonant frequencies. A larger instrument produces lower ones. This is not a preference; it is physics. The same note played on a Jabutun-sized violin and a Tiscythian-sized violin is the same note in the same key, but it is not the same sound — the overtone structure, the way the note blooms and decays, the particular character of the resonance is different. Bigger body, more fundamental. More fundamental, different feeling.
This means that when Arseny plays a Lupenite-scaled keyboard and Lenny plays a Giant-grade upright bass in the same room, they are not just playing instruments of different sizes. They are playing instruments that exploit different parts of the acoustic spectrum by design, and they are doing so in a room that was built to comfortably enclose a family of Leonites, which means the room has its own acoustic properties — higher ceilings, more cubic volume, walls set farther apart — that interact with both instruments differently than they would in a Lupenite apartment.
Arseny noticed this the first time he brought his keyboard over to Lenny's apartment for a practice session and found that the mid-range frequencies that dominate a keyboard's output sat in the room differently than they did in his own living room. Not worse, necessarily. Different. The room had more space for the sound to move through, which changed the way the reverb worked, which changed the way you had to play to make the music land the way you wanted it to land. He adapted. This is what musicians do, and Arseny is a musician in the sense that Boris made all his children musicians: not by producing professionals, but by producing people who pay attention to sound.
Boris knows about the group.
He finds out about it the way Boris finds out about most things his children are doing — not because they report to him, but because the apartment walls in the Brighton Beach Oceana complex are good but not perfect, and Boris has been paying attention to music his entire life, and when his fourth son starts playing keyboard every Thursday evening next door, Boris can hear enough of what's happening to know whether it's worth asking about.
It is worth asking about. He asks.
Arseny tells him: a few people, Lenny Leontin on bass, a couple others with guitars and a cajon, nothing formal, just playing. Boris asks what they're working on. Arseny says it's not really working on anything, it's more like feeling out what fits together. Boris says this is how it starts, and that is the end of the conversation.
There is something Boris does not mention in this conversation, partly because it doesn't come up and partly because it is not the kind of thing Boris leads with: Boris can dance.
Not casually. Not the way most people can dance when the music is right and the room is forgiving. Boris can actually dance, with the particular fluency of someone who put in the hours — in his case, the hours of a thirteen-year-old in a three-room Moscow apartment in 1983, watching Michael Jackson music videos and going back to the living room to practice what he'd seen.
This requires a small historical note. In this world, the Soviet state ended faster than in ours — when Stalin died, the United States executed a plan that had been prepared in advance: the Romanov family, who had been living under American asylum and protection since they were offered it by Giovanni Amerigo, was restored to the Russian throne. The new Russian government was rebuilt with American help on the "American Model" of constitutional monarchy — the same framework that had been adopted across much of Europe after the First World War — in which the Emperor handles foreign policy and an elected executive handles domestic affairs. Russia by the 1980s was a constitutional monarchy, not a communist state in the usual sense.
The economic transformation, however, took longer than the political one. The material conditions of Boris's Moscow childhood were still what they were — a three-room apartment, parents who were not wealthy, the particular texture of a city still finding its footing under a new order. But the openness was real. American programming was on Moscow airways. MTV included. The music got through. The videos got through.
He taught himself. Obsessively, methodically, the way Boris does things — the same way he had been learning piano for seven years by then, the same way he would later pursue two degrees simultaneously without treating this as unusual. This was not a child with unlimited free time. Boris was the eldest of six, in a three-room apartment that also housed his maternal grandparents, and from a young age he had been part of the machinery that kept the household running — cooking, cleaning, minding the younger ones, the practical competence that the eldest in a large family acquires not by choice but by necessity. His father Gustav worked two jobs: carpentry, which was the family trade, and professional weight training, which was what had gotten Boris into the gym around age twelve, spending after-school hours in the corner while Gustav worked with clients. The apartment was full, the schedule was full, and Boris at thirteen was nevertheless going to learn these moves.
Gustav thought it was wonderful. He would sit in the corner of the living room — the same living room where the piano lived, where the younger children were always underfoot — and watch Boris work through the choreography of Thriller and Billie Jean while the music played.
There is something worth noting about Michael Jackson, for anyone who has read the Jabutun Deep Dive on this blog: Jackson is a Jabutun. Large Grade II — the same size tier as a Lupenite — long-limbed, lanky, with the signature tear lines running from inner eye to jaw. What makes a Jabutun's movement distinctive is not about being small. It is about the Jabutun propensity: perceptual time-slowing, the ability to process information at extreme rates. A Jabutun breaking down a movement in rehearsal is not watching what an ordinary person watches — they are seeing intervals that most people cannot perceive, subdivisions of a quarter-beat that exist below the threshold of normal attention. This is what MJ's choreography expresses: not lightness, but extraordinary precision — the natural result of a mind that can slow time down far enough to find the exact position every limb should occupy at every moment.
Boris at thirteen was a Lupenite boy already heading toward the frame that would eventually make him Mr. Russia. The Lupenite propensity is not perceptual time-slowing. It is sustained endurance, pack coordination, collective attention — the temperament of someone built for the long run, not the full sprint. He was not going to move like Michael Jackson. He knew this and did not particularly care, because what he was learning was not the Jabutun version of those moves. He was learning what the moves meant — where the weight shifted, how the rhythm lived in the body, what it felt like to let music organize your movement instead of imposing movement on top of music. That understanding translates across species. The expression of it doesn't, and doesn't need to. Boris's version of those moves is Boris's version: a Lupenite doing something that is unmistakably rooted in what he watched on those videos, and equally unmistakably his own.
His mother Krystal was the one who could also dance — Boris inherited it from her, the specific coordination and musicality that makes the difference between someone going through the motions and someone who actually understands what their body is supposed to be doing. Krystal had taken formal tap and ballroom lessons when she was young, and it showed: not in the way formal training shows when it's been practiced recently, but in the way it shows when it's been internalized — in the body's intuitive relationship with rhythm, the sense of where the weight should be and when. Boris, learning from MTV videos in the living room of that apartment, was not starting from nothing. He was starting from his mother's bones. Krystal had grown up watching her own mother cook for the Kremlin and had absorbed the same quality of attention in everything she did: you do things completely, or you don't do them.
By the time Boris arrived in Brighton Beach, he was a large Lupenite man with a Biology PhD, a Music Minor, six years of competitive bodybuilding behind him, and the ability to dance in a way that consistently caused people to do a double take. Vladimir and Ilariy and Sergei all inherited it — the particular gift that moves through the Volorsky line — and there is something genuinely funny about watching Boris and his sons in a room with music, because nothing about the external presentation suggests what is about to happen.
This is the hidden part of Boris's musical life that the piano lessons don't show. The lessons show precision, tradition, transmission — a grandmother's gift passed forward through proper teachers and a minor's worth of theory and twenty years of students sitting on the same bench. The dancing shows something else: that Boris at thirteen was doing exactly what Arseny is doing now next door. Finding out what happens when you take music seriously in your whole body. Discovering that the soul reaches for it in every available direction, not just the ones you were formally trained for.
What Boris does not say, but what he has known for the better part of his life, is that this is specifically how it starts between people of different species. In a single-species ensemble, the musical conversation has a natural grammar — the instruments are sized for similar bodies, the voice ranges occupy similar registers, the intuitive sense of what a melody should feel like is roughly calibrated to similar acoustic experience. It's not that multi-species ensembles don't have this. They develop it. But they develop it differently, because they're starting from different intuitions about what music is supposed to feel like in the body that's producing it.
A Lupenite's hearing range is excellent at the mid and upper frequencies — the register where most melodic content in human music lives. A Leonite hears the lower frequencies with more resolution than a Lupenite does; the bass notes that sit in the background of most music are, for a Leonite, in the foreground. This is not a deficiency on anyone's part. It is two different sets of ears listening to the same music and hearing, correctly, two different things. When Arseny is playing keyboard and Lenny is playing bass, they are not just playing complementary instruments — they are playing from complementary listening positions, and the music they make together is something that neither of them would make alone, not because they're a good musical fit, but because they're hearing the same sound from different perspectives and trying to tell each other what they hear.
This is, Boris would tell you, why ensemble music exists. Not because one person can't play well alone. Because what you hear alone and what you hear together are fundamentally different things.
The question of voice is where this gets most interesting.
Every species in this world sings. This is not a creative choice; it is an anthropological fact of the same order as the fact that every human culture has music. The Imago Dei framework makes a specific prediction about this: the soul that reaches for language also reaches for song, because song is what language does when it needs to carry more than words. If you accept that the soul is constant across species, you accept that the reaching is constant. What varies is what the reaching sounds like when it comes out of different bodies.
A Lupenite voice sits in a particular register. Mid-range, rich in the upper harmonics, with the kind of tone that carries well in enclosed spaces — which makes sense, given that Lupenites evolved in social environments where communication across a room was a constant practical requirement. All eight Volorsky children can sing, as a matter of family culture and Boris's quiet insistence, and they can sing well, as a matter of the genetic inheritance that made Boris the man he is and Larissa the woman she is. Arseny is the one who incorporates it most consciously into how he plays. He sings the way he plays keyboard: not performing, working. Finding out where the note wants to go.
A Leonite voice operates differently. The same scale on a piano — same notes, same relationships between them — produces a different cognitive and physical experience when sung by a Leonite than when sung by a Lupenite, because the Leonite vocal apparatus is larger, the resonating chambers are bigger, and the fundamental frequencies that feel natural to sing are lower. This isn't about range the way a voice teacher talks about range — it's about center of gravity. Where does the voice want to live? A Lupenite voice wants to live in the middle of the piano and above. A Leonite voice wants to live in the bottom third of the piano and find its way up from there.
When Arseny sings the melody and Lenny sings along, they don't sing the same part. They work this out quickly, by feel rather than by theory, the way musicians who are actually playing together work things out — Lenny drops an octave, or stays in the low harmony, or leaves the singing to Arseny and focuses on what his bass is doing. The music that results is fuller than either of them would produce solo. The range they cover together is wider. The two centers of gravity create a structure that neither of them has alone.
Boris, in the apartment next door, hears this through the wall and thinks: yes, that's right. That's the thing.
The practical side of multi-species musical life is worth taking seriously before you assume it's been solved.
Professional instruments exist in the full range of size grades, as a matter of commercial necessity — the Leonite market for quality instruments is not small, and the Jabutun market is not small either, and instrument makers who want to be in business have been building to the full range since before anyone thought of it as a design choice. Concert halls are built to the same logic as schools: from the floor plan outward, to accommodate whoever is going to be there, with acoustics engineered by people who have learned to account for the fact that a Giant Grade II audience and a Small Grade I audience hear differently and need to be served by the same room.
The interesting problems are not at the professional level, where the infrastructure is established. They're at the informal level — the level of Arseny carrying his keyboard to the apartment next door, of figuring out what stand height to set it at so that someone of Lenny's height can sit at it comfortably if he wants to try something, of negotiating the acoustic difference between the two apartments through the lived experience of playing in both. These are not formal engineering problems. They're musical problems — the kind of problems you solve by playing until you know what works.
There is also the question of notation. A written score is species-neutral in the sense that Middle C is Middle C regardless of who is reading it. But it is not neutral in the sense of which register feels natural to read in — a Leonite musician reading from a treble-clef part that sits at the top of their range is doing something technically correct and physically uncomfortable, the same way a human soprano singing the bass part in a Handel oratorio is technically capable but clearly in the wrong register. Multi-species ensembles develop conventions: who reads which part, how to notate the low-octave substitution, what it means when you transpose a melody down a fifth for the Leonite singer who is going to carry it through a whole set.
None of this is catastrophic. All of it matters. The world that takes it seriously produces better music than the world that doesn't, because the world that takes it seriously understands what it has: not one kind of music-making apparatus, but a range of them, each with its own acoustic character, each reaching for the same thing.
What Boris found, at six, sitting at the piano for the first time, was not a technique. It was a feeling. The feeling of sound organized in time, of notes that led to other notes, of the specific pleasure of making something happen by pressing keys in the right order. He did not have words for it then. He has better words for it now. What he found was music — the particular human experience of sound organized with intention — and the fact that his hands were Lupenite hands and the piano was sized for Lupenite hands was not the point. The point was the finding.
He has watched all eight of his children find the same thing, in various shapes and at various ages. Arseny found it early and in multiple directions at once — keyboard, guitar, synthesizer, the shape of a chord in his voice — and Boris has watched him find it again with every instrument and every new context, including the Thursday evening sessions at the Leontins' apartment that Boris can hear from his living room if he is paying attention.
What Arseny is doing in that apartment is not performing. He is playing. The word is worth taking seriously. Children play — it's what children call the activity of exploring a system to see how it works, without a predetermined outcome. Musicians who are still becoming musicians do the same thing. They bring the keyboard over and set up the stand and figure out where the light switch is and tune Lenny's bass a little and start playing something to see what happens. The music that results from two or three hours of this is not a composition. It is a record of several people discovering something together.
Boris is not in the apartment next door. But Boris knows what this is, because Boris has been doing it for his entire life — the particular act of sitting down at a piano and finding out what is there. He did it at six in Russia. He did it in his twenties in the cramped apartment in Brighton Beach where he and Larissa were first married. He did it in the living room of the apartment where his children grew up, while those children were growing up around him, and he did it this morning before the first student arrived.
What he heard through the wall, Thursday evening, was his son doing the same thing in a room that was three times the size, with a Leonite and a few other people, with instruments that covered a range that Boris's piano alone does not cover.
He thought: good. That's how it goes.
The soul that reaches for music reaches for it regardless of what body it's in. The bodies determine what music sounds like — the voice range, the instrument size, the acoustic character of the room, the particular register where the melody wants to live. The soul determines the reaching itself. Those are not the same thing, and conflating them is the mistake. A Leonite bass line and a Lupenite melody are different physical events. They are not different intentions. They are both doing the same thing, which is what music has always been doing: organizing sound in time so that it carries what words alone cannot.
Boris knows this. He has known it since he was six.
He teaches it to everyone who sits next to him on the bench, one lesson at a time.
— Eric Flegal
Part of the Applied Worldbuilding Series
What instrument would you design specifically for a species you've never written before — and what would it tell you about how they hear the world? Tell me in the comments.
