Talk:The Jupiter Theft

What is the point in writing down the complete plot without even a spoiler alert? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.223.147.182 (talk) 20:58, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
 * See WP:SPOILER.-- Auric    talk  19:53, 13 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It's a pretty thin account of the plot, it's unlikely to be a great deal more spoilery than, say, the Amazon listing. 209.93.141.17 (talk) 21:36, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Early example of sampling
Am I ok to Be Bold and delete that bit? It's been a while since I read the book, but I remember that part fairly clearly (I'm here instead to check on how the star-drive worked...), and it had nothing to do with sampling at all. The MiniMoog synth is simply that... a portable analogue modular synthesiser (and additive, rather than subtractive one, IIRC), with its sound manipulated by patch cables, switches, potentiometer dials, etc - the novel was written in the 1970s, when digital sampling as a concept simply didn't exist, and an adjustable electronic keyboard of any kind (let alone a polyphonic one such as used in the story - a slight liberty given the real Minimoog was monophonic and nowhere near as flexible) was pretty cutting-edge.

The text in fact refers to the initial, extremely rushed attempt the musically-gifted character makes at "speaking" Cygnan using the machine (vital as he is no longer hampered by a severe speech impediment, from the aliens' point of view - ie, only being able to whistle one note at a time instead of upto three and having to rely on arpeggiation to simulate chords, and not being able to replicate their particular timbre) as being a pretty rough and a barely recognisable rendition of the chosen word, even after about thirty seconds of frantic knob-twiddling. It then takes a little more time to refine it into a much less "accented" synth-voice, as he is directly altering the underlying synthesis components.

This actually works much better in context than simply recording individual words (or syllables) and playing them back, however, as it allows "playing" the Moog as if it was an actual alien voicebox, or indeed something similar to a more familiar computer human-voice synth modified so the actual component sounds are exposed to the user and triggered by hand using keyboard & gaming mouse (or an analogue pressure-sensitive joypad) instead of responding to typed words, so a high degree of fluency and immediate response and interactive conversation is achievable; same as normal everyday speech, as soon as you have a thought or a reaction, you can make an appropriate sound, just the nervous impulses end up going to muscles in the fingers and thumbs instead of in the larynx, tongue, jaw, lips and lungs.

There might have been some use of a small macro recorder or subroutine programming function to allow multiple settings changes with one button press, or single-key production of sounds difficult to achieve with two hands of five digits each, but that's as far as that would have gone (there's certainly mention of altering the "scale" by detuning individual notes in the octave up and down, which would likely involve some kind of persistent electronic memory and a multiplexer to duplicate the change across multiple octaves, unless the synth had a long bank of individual pots dedicated to providing that one extremely niche ability - even on my moderately sophisticated (for its 1990s vintage) Roland keyboard, that same adjustment is accessed via a rather complex sequence of button presses in an already little-used section of the control panel, and I only ever used it once... to see what it did).

Really, for all his imagination about future politics, space exploration, truly "Alien" alien creatures and societies (an entire zoo of them, even, each of which could have stood a novel of their own, never mind the more fully examined Cygnan one), and the hard sci-fi tech used to travel between stars, Moffitt's vision of how more domestic Terran technology might develop is strangely stagnant in TJT. The synth itself seems contemporary to the futuristic setting even though it was essentially a carbon copy of one already on sale at the time the book was written; computers, TV/radio, telecommunications, even clothing & musical fashions and materials science appear to have hardly progressed if at all (the fashion being handwaved as a retro fad, I think?); and the nearest thing to any kind of personal computing tech is something that a modern reader might immediately assume to be a digital slate (iPad etc) or at least a tablet PC or large PDA (reading it around 2000, I took it as an overgrown Palmpilot or something similar to Atari's vapourware ST-Book), but actually turns out to be nothing more than an etch-a-sketch type notepad with an electronic (possibly analogue, raster-scan-and-delay-line based) memory holding 8 rapidly-switchable or erasable pages. So putting any kind of sampling in there... nah. Closest it would have got is some kind of frequency analysis assistance maybe (which is obviated by the character having perfect pitch, thus a built-in FFT analyser), or a mellotron-style series of individual recording tapes holding a few seconds of sound each and recorded exactly the same way as a normal audio cassette. However, even that isn't actually the case in-story... in fact as mentioned at the start, the only liberties taken with the Minimoog's spec is that it had polyphonic abilities (understandable as it's essential to the story) and some of the particular adjustments possible on it over and above the real thing (more for flavour than anything, but hey, go big or go home). And, I suppose, the actual portability of the thing, which would have been more "can be carried by a single person without needing a trolley" in reality (even in low-G; it's about the size of an early 80s "suitcase" portable computer, and "mini" in the concept that it can't double up as a major piece of ornamental furniture), rather than "easily carried along under one arm" (like a modern small or medium-size "toy" synth) as the use of the story version suggests. But the core abilities beside those one-and-two-halves are unchanged.

OK, rather long explanation for a small change, but there's no limit on available space here and I figured I may as well be clear... :)209.93.141.17 (talk) 22:17, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Also, removing the "stub" tag, as there's three reasonable sized paragraphs there now, and there's not too much else to add about the book or its story really, at least IMHO; the preexisting boxout has a decent pile of general info too. 209.93.141.17 (talk) 00:13, 12 September 2017 (UTC)