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Fairlight CMI

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The Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) was the first digital sampling synthesiser. It was designed by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, based on a dual microprocessor computer designed by Tony Furse, in Sydney, Australia in the late 1970s, and rose to prominence in the early 1980s.

The first buyers of the new system were Peter Gabriel, Todd Rundgren, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, producer Rhett Lawrence and Stevie Wonder. Among the first commercially released albums to incorporate it were Kate Bush's Never for Ever (1980) and Jean-Michel Jarre's Magnetic Fields (1981). Jarre also made extensive use of the instrument on his Concerts in China (1982) and Zoolook (1984) albums. It was used on The Buggles' last album, Adventures in Modern Recording, and Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" and its parent album Security (all 1982).

Contents

History

The Fairlight sound was a development of an earlier synthesiser called the Quasar M8, an attempt to create sound by modelling all of the parameters of a waveform in real time. Unfortunately, this was beyond the available processing power of the day, and the results were disappointing. In an attempt to make something of it, Vogel and Ryrie decided to see what it would do with a naturally recorded sound as a starting point. To their surprise the effect was remarkable, and the sampler was born. By 1979, the Fairlight CMI Series I was being demonstrated, but the sound quality was not quite up to professional standards, having only 24kHz sampling, and it wasn't until the Series II of 1982 that this was rectified. In 1983 MIDI was added with the Series IIx, and in 1985, support for full CD quality sampling was available with the Series III.

The Fairlight ran its own operating system known as QDOS (was a modified version of the Motorola MDOS operating system) and had a primitive (by modern standards) menu-driven GUI. The basic system used a number of Motorola 6800 processors, with separate cards dealing with specific parts of the system, such as the display driver, keyboard interface, etc. The main device for interacting with the machine apart from the keyboard was a light pen, which could be used to select options presented on a monochrome green-screen

The Series III model dropped the lightpen interface (the lightpen cable apparently was one of the most fragile hardware elements in the system) in favour of a graphics tablet interface which was built in to the keyboard. This model was built around Motorola 68000 processors, running Microware's OS-9 Level II operating system (6809 version). One of the Fairlight's most significant software features was the so-called "Page R", which was a real time graphical pattern sequence editor, widely copied on other software synths since. This feature was often a key part of the buying decision of artists.

The Fairlight CMI was very well built, and consequently very high-priced. A Series I with all options sold for close to 1 million US dollars, though later models were comparatively cheaper as well as more advanced. A Fairlight CMI can be seen in the Devo film, We Are Devo and Jan Hammer's music video for the Miami Vice theme song.

Fairlight went bankrupt a few years later owing to the expense of building the instruments — AUD$20,000 in components per unit. Peter Vogel said in 2005, "We were reliant on sales to pay the wages and it was a horrendously expensive business ... Our sales were good right up to the last minute, but we just couldn't finance the expansion and the R&D."

Influence

The success of the Fairlight CMI caused other firms to introduce sampling. New England Digital modified their Synclavier digital synth to perform sampling, while E-mu introduced a less costly sampling keyboard, the Emulator, in 1981.

In the United States, a new sampler company called Ensoniq introduced the Ensoniq Mirage in 1985, at a price that made sampling affordable for the first time to the average musician. Though the Ensoniq Mirage was essentially a poor man's sampler with significantly inferior hardware specs, at less than $2000, it was nevertheless sufficiently powered (8-bit microprocessor) to signal the end of the CMI. In addition to these low-cost dedicated systems, very cheap add-in cards for popular home computers started to appear at this time, for example the Apple II-based Greengate DS3 sampler card, and new computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh featured built-in sampling sound systems.

Features Timeline

Quasar I, II, and (last) M8 (1975-1977)

CMI Series I (1979)

CMI Series II (1980)

CMI Series IIx (1983)

CMI Series III (1985)

Sound Clips

Note: These sound clips require an Ogg Vorbis player. Click here for a list of downloadable players.

Artists using the Fairlight CMI

External links and references

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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