Songs and singing are significant to One Esk’s life. Breq even wonders if One Esk’s fondness for music played a role in its apparent development of a consciousness separate from that of Justice of Toren: “Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all the other units on the ship, indeed in the fleets?” (207). One Esk’s interest in collecting vocal music from the planets it visits adds depth to One Esk’s relationships with the local people. In Ors, the local children are accustomed to teaching One Esk songs, and the head priest, who once regarded the ancillaries with horror, tells One Esk about the music that was once sung in the temple: “[T]wo choirs, a hundred voices each. You would have liked it” (50).

Music also plays a key role in One Esk’s memories of Valskaay, the planet whose people stubbornly resisted the incorporation of their religion into the religion of Amaat. There, One Esk downloaded a vast library of choral music and discreetly attended meetings of choral societies. On Valskaay, remembers One Esk, “even the rebels, trapped at last, had sung, either in defiance against us or as consolation for themselves, their voices reaching my appreciative ears as I stood at the mouth of the cave where they hid” (216).