I think it would be pretty clear it was fiction, based on the outro talking about the author's fictional works or the lack of introduction of the perspective character and their name, history, location; those are the sorts of things you include in human interest pieces that are written similarly.
> We commissioned this new short story from Robin as a little love-letter and thank-you to the city and people...
Sure, it's right at the bottom, and "short story" is not entirely unambiguous, but I think most people would commonly use that phrase to refer to a work of fiction. I think I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd known it was fiction from the start, but making that too obvious at the beginning may have removed a little of the charm.
First of all, this machine seems to be polyphonic - it can play many voices simultaneously. I think the big Moogs (like TONTO, i.e. Cecil and Margouleff) were polyphonic; but this doesn't sound like a Moog (Moogs weren't red).
Secondly, the writer speaks of a "patch" that plays itself. In my day, a "patch" was a configuration of cables connecting oscillators, filters, modulators and an envelope-shaper together; the patch defined a single sound, not a melody.
The analogue synth I played with was an EMS VCS3. It belonged to the electronics lab at school. The patch cables were replaced with a patchboard, a grid connecting rows of inputs to columns of outputs using pins. You could stick a card overlay to the patchboard, and make holes where the pins were supposed to go, if you wanted to reproduce a specific patch.
If you wanted a melody, you could buy an add-on keyboard and sequencer; but the electronics lab didn't splash out. A sequence stored in the sequencer was NOT referred to as a "patch".
I spent many hours tinkering with this thing. It didn't matter that it had no keyboard; I was no musician. The VCS3, like most VC synths, wasn't very stable, and wasn't much used live. The Who used one for the Live At Leeds album, and Hawkwind used the VCS3 (but with no keyboard, so the instability didn't matter; they used it to make all sorts of bleeps and whistles). I think Gong also used a VCS3, also without a keyboard.
This machine was often out of service for repairs; people would try to use it as an effects processor, and would plug an electric guitar into it. That would fry the circuitry, and the school would have to buy replacement modules. You could use it as an effects processor, but not with electric guitars.
A “patch” could also include a wire to an an external sequencer or arpeggiator, and in this way would include a “melody”. This is trivially easy to do in a software synth, but also perfectly possible in an original “patch”.
The article makes it sound as if just switching the machine on with the right patch configured, gives you a polyphonic composition.
Even if you patch-in a sequencer, the patch doesn't include the sequence. You couldn't use patch cords to determine the melody.
Also, I think that back in the analogue synth days, you couldn't get a sequencer that stored multiple parts; one sequencer, one part. Also storage was limited; you couldn't sequence more than a few lines of music.
Maybe I remember wrong; I didn't get to mess with sequencers.
As pointed out in sibling posts, it is a (very charming, IMHO) work of fiction, and as such the librarian could be considered an unreliable narrator rather than a fact-checking journalist. A little artistic licence goes a long way and although it may not be exactly how modular synths commonly work I think it was a nice literary device to build wonder around what the machine can do.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] threadEdit, the author, Robin Sloan, is a fiction writer. That's... a little disappointing, but still it was a wonderful story.
It should have somehow been tagged as fiction.
Sure, it's right at the bottom, and "short story" is not entirely unambiguous, but I think most people would commonly use that phrase to refer to a work of fiction. I think I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd known it was fiction from the start, but making that too obvious at the beginning may have removed a little of the charm.
The synth itself is real, however. Here's a video of someone much younger than Maisie making noises with it... https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2016/05/21/modular-synth-...
Thanks for posting o/
Great story too!
First of all, this machine seems to be polyphonic - it can play many voices simultaneously. I think the big Moogs (like TONTO, i.e. Cecil and Margouleff) were polyphonic; but this doesn't sound like a Moog (Moogs weren't red).
Secondly, the writer speaks of a "patch" that plays itself. In my day, a "patch" was a configuration of cables connecting oscillators, filters, modulators and an envelope-shaper together; the patch defined a single sound, not a melody.
The analogue synth I played with was an EMS VCS3. It belonged to the electronics lab at school. The patch cables were replaced with a patchboard, a grid connecting rows of inputs to columns of outputs using pins. You could stick a card overlay to the patchboard, and make holes where the pins were supposed to go, if you wanted to reproduce a specific patch.
If you wanted a melody, you could buy an add-on keyboard and sequencer; but the electronics lab didn't splash out. A sequence stored in the sequencer was NOT referred to as a "patch".
I spent many hours tinkering with this thing. It didn't matter that it had no keyboard; I was no musician. The VCS3, like most VC synths, wasn't very stable, and wasn't much used live. The Who used one for the Live At Leeds album, and Hawkwind used the VCS3 (but with no keyboard, so the instability didn't matter; they used it to make all sorts of bleeps and whistles). I think Gong also used a VCS3, also without a keyboard.
This machine was often out of service for repairs; people would try to use it as an effects processor, and would plug an electric guitar into it. That would fry the circuitry, and the school would have to buy replacement modules. You could use it as an effects processor, but not with electric guitars.
https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2016/03/02/the-lawrence-p...
Even if you patch-in a sequencer, the patch doesn't include the sequence. You couldn't use patch cords to determine the melody.
Also, I think that back in the analogue synth days, you couldn't get a sequencer that stored multiple parts; one sequencer, one part. Also storage was limited; you couldn't sequence more than a few lines of music.
Maybe I remember wrong; I didn't get to mess with sequencers.