FEATURE:
Music Technology Breakthroughs
Part Eight: The Fairlight CMI
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THROUGH the course of this series…
I have discussed software and hardware technological breakthroughs in music. Today, I want to look at the Fairlight CMI. In terms of models, we have Series I: 1979–1982, Series II: 1982–1985, and Series III: 1985–1989. I am going to include a playlist at the end of the feature that compiles songs where the Fairlight CMI plays a part. Before moving on to quote from an article that highlights huge songs that have employed the Fairlight CMI, here is some history about a piece of technology that helped transformed music:
“The Fairlight CMI (short for Computer Musical Instrument) is a digital synthesizer, sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 by Fairlight. It was based on a commercial licence of the Qasar M8 developed by Tony Furse of Creative Strategies in Sydney, Australia. It was one of the earliest music workstations with an embedded digital sampler, and is credited for coining the term sampling in music. It rose to prominence in the early 1980s and competed with the Synclavier from New England Digital.
In the 1970s, Kim Ryrie, then a teenager, had an idea to develop a build-it-yourself analogue synthesizer to be called the ETI 4600, for his family's magazine Electronics Today International (ETI). Ryrie was frustrated by the limited number of sounds that the analogue device could make. After his classmate, Peter Vogel, graduated from high school and had a brief stint at university in 1975, Ryrie asked Vogel if he would be interested in making "the world's greatest synthesizer" based on the recently announced microprocessor. He recalled: "We had long been interested in computers - I built my first computer when I was about 12 - and it was obvious to me that combining digital technology with music synthesis was the way to go."
In December that year, he and Vogel formed a house-based company to manufacture digital synthesizers. They named it Fairlight after the hydrofoil ferry passing before Ryrie's grandmother's home in Sydney Harbour. The two planned to design a digital synthesizer that could create sounds reminiscent of acoustic instruments (physical modelling synthesis). They initially planned to make an analogue synth that was digitally controlled, given that the competing Moog analog synthesizer was difficult to control.
After six months, the pair met Motorola consultant Tony Furse. In association with the Canberra School of Electronic Music, Furse built a digital synthesizer using two 8-bit Motorola 6800 microprocessors, and the light pen and some of the graphics that would later become part of the Fairlight CMI. However, the machine was only able to create exact harmonic partials, sounding sterile and inexpressive.
Vogel and Ryrie licensed Furse's design, mainly for its processing power, and decided to use microprocessor technology instead of analogue synthesis. Over the next year, the duo made what Ryrie called a "research design", the bulky, expensive, and unmarketable eight-voice synthesizer QASAR M8, which included a two-by-two-by-four foot processing box and a keyboard.
By 1978, Vogel and Ryrie were making "interesting" but unrealistic sounds. Hoping to learn how to synthesize an instrument by studying the harmonics of real instruments, Vogel recorded about a second of a piano piece from a radio broadcast. He discovered that by playing the recording back at different pitches, it sounded much more realistic than a synthesized piano. He recalled in 2005:
It sounded remarkably like a piano, a real piano. This had never been done before ... By today's standards it was a pretty awful piano sound, but at the time it was a million times more like a piano than anything any synthesizer had churned out. So I rapidly realised that we didn't have to bother with all the synthesis stuff. Just take the sounds, whack them in the memory and away you go.
Vogel and Ryrie coined the term sampling to describe this process.[9] With the Fairlight CMI, they could now produce endless sounds, but control was limited to attack, sustain, decay and vibrato. According to Ryrie, "We regarded using recorded real-life sounds as a compromise - as cheating - and we didn't feel particularly proud of it." They continued to work on the design while making money by creating office computers for Remington Office Machines, which Ryrie described as "a horrendous exercise, but we sold 120 of them".
I can only imagine how musicians reacted to the news of the Fairlight CMI and what it could do to music! Prior to 1979, there was technology that allowed musicians some sonic freedom - but nothing quite as revolutionary and fascinating as the Fairlight CMI. We all know a great song where we hear a sample/sound from a Fairlight CMI. My favourite is Kate Bush’s Babooshka – which I will bring in soon –, that has the sound of breaking glass on it.
In the U.K., Peter Gabriel was among the first people to utilise and promulgate the Fairlight CMI. I want to introduce a fascinating article from the Science+ Media Museum, that outlines notable songs that have used the Fairlight CMI. I have selected a few:
“Can you hear this sweet sound at the beginning of ‘San Jacinto’? It’s not a real marimba. It’s a sound produced by a Fairlight CMI.
Peter Gabriel owned the first Fairlight CMI in the UK, and was the first musician here to release an album featuring its sounds. Initially, he was assisted by Peter Vogel, one of the Fairlight’s designers, who was primarily interested in the use of digital synthesis to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments.
The Fairlight did indeed out a wide range of pre-recorded sounds of acoustic instruments at your fingertips: an ‘orchestra for sale’, according to the first sales slogan.
“Insert a systems disc in the left-hand drive, a library disc in the right, and you can explore a world of sound limited only by your imagination”
—Giles Dawson, New Scientist magazine, 1983
Musicians at the time were concerned about being replaced, but in the end they needn’t have worried: the sound quality was good, but not enough to replace the real thing. However, the Fairlight’s capability went far beyond the reproduction of acoustic instruments; there was another feature that transformed this synthesizer in a mainstay of electronic music.
The Fairlight was also presented as a compositional tool, a technology to allow you to explore your creativity and ideas well beyond what was possible before. In addition to the reproduction of acoustic instruments, in fact, the Fairlight allowed musicians to incorporate any type of sound into their music: it officially began the era of digital sampling. This opportunity was what attracted Kate Bush the most: “What really gets me about the Fairlight is that any sound becomes music. You can actually control any sound that you want by sampling it and then playing it.”
Inspired by Peter Gabriel’s experiments with everyday objects, the singer started to use sampling in Never for Ever (1980), assisted by Richard Burgess. The album features the sounds of footsteps on stairs, buzzing insects, and cocking rifles. But the most famous is the sound of breaking glass that punctuates the first song, ‘Babooshka’. Can you imagine transforming your favourite sound into a musical pattern that you can play on a keyboard?
The development of sound technologies increased the quality of pre-recorded orchestral sound and decreased the price of digital synthesizers. From the 1990s, more accessible synths and samplers hit the market, offering crisper variations of ORCH2.
The term ‘orchestra hit’ describes a synthesized sound effect that layers the sound of numerous orchestral instruments to create a dramatic staccato note. Today, this effect can be found in all sorts of digital mixers, and appears in many 90s teen-pop classic hits including Britney Spears’ ‘Lucky’ and the Backstreet Boys’ ‘It’s Gotta Be You’. It is also the symbol of the Fairlight’s legacy, going far beyond the use of pre-recorded orchestral sounds in popular music.
The first digital sampling synthesizer opened the way to a new era of music production: an era where we can generate and manipulate sounds from computers, create music from any source of sound, and make music together in different spaces and times. All these new opportunities originated from a machine that embodied the origins of our contemporary digital culture. A culture where anyone can explore a world of sound limited only by our imagination”.
It is a shame that the Fairlight CMI is not used more widely today. Perhaps it is seen as a bit clunky and old-fashioned. As technology allows for sampling and a range of sounds, maybe the innovation of the Fairlight CMI seems quaint and limited today. That said, the In 2015, the Fairlight CMI was inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia collection. As you will hear from the playlist at the end (and the songs I have already included), the Fairlight CMI was this transformative breakthrough that artists were keen to employ! If people do not use the Fairlight CMI a lot today…
ITS influence and legacy has been established.