This was a beautiful story, but was it fiction? I can't find the song named in the article, nor the "King Ozy" producer they are talking about.

Edit, the author, Robin Sloan, is a fiction writer. That's... a little disappointing, but still it was a wonderful story.

I agree it was a good story, but I became skeptical when I could not find the music (or any reference to it, or the composers) on-line.

It should have somehow been tagged as fiction.

> 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.

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-...

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.

What a wonderful story, certainly brought a tear to the eye and a smile to my face.

Thanks for posting o/

_Great_ site! It uses web audio to create a tunable synthesizer with delay, attack, release, and other config options.

Great story too!

* * *

Here's the synthesizer:

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2016/03/02/the-lawrence-p...

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.

Also, I think that back in the analogue synth days, you couldn't get a seq

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.