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CT
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The 80’s; one thing that CAN be said of that decade
is that it was one of great innovation and
technological revolution. It was the decade where
computers became household objects and the
future really felt like it was up for grabs. And it was
the development of one computer in particular, in
Australia, that would change the way music is made
to this very day. Born out of the desire to create
acoustic sounds using electronics, the Fairlight
Computer Music Instrument, or CMI for short, would
be ground zero for almost every facet of modern
music technology that we use today. But how did it
achieve such status?
The CMI’s story began in the
basement of the house
belonging to one of its coinventor’s,
Kim Ryrie. Ryrie had
enlisted the help of his school
friend and a dangerously
curious guy called Peter Vogel.
Their plan was to create an
instrument that could authentically reproduce
acoustic sounds using electronics. This was the goal
of most synth manufacturers of the day. Look at any
analogue synthesiser during the 1970s, and most
would have settings or patch sheets named after
trumpets, violins or oboes. But try as they might,
using additive synthesis, they kept failing, unable to
create and process harmonic tones well enough to
deliver what they wanted to hear.
“
Access to the
new Motorola
6800 CPU’s
“
Coincidentally, in Australia’s
capital city, Tony Furse was
trying, and failing, to do the
same. But Tony worked for
RCA and had access to the
then new Motorola 6800
CPU. He decided this was the
way forward and developed
his QASAR Multimode 8 (aka
the M8). A veritable birds
nest of wire wrapping and no
PCBs, it began to show signs
of promise and utilised a
very modern CRT monitor
and light pen to draw
harmonic waveforms and
used Fast Fourier Transform
to try and get those elusive
sounds. But it wasn’t
happening. Vogel & Ryrie got wind of Furse’s work,
drove down to Canberra from their Sydney base, liked
what they saw and licensed the tech to see if they
could take it further. Soon, the M8 became the
QASAR CMI, the wire wrapping replaced by custom
built PCB’s, set out in a modular fashion, each with a
specific task. But still, they failed to make anything
sound authentic enough. Until one day, exasperated
by their persistent failure, Vogel wondered if he could
convert analogue sound into digital data, store it in
RAM and then play it back via a keyboard. Building
his own ADC/DAC’s, his initial experiments yielded
not only success, but delivered a truly authentic
recreation of the sound fed in. Little did he know that
he had just discovered digital
sampling and that he was about
to change the world.
Feeling like a cheat, he showed
his discovery to his partner and
they decided to run with it.
Development continued apace
until November of 1979 when the first CMI, the Series
I, was unveiled to the world at various shows such as
AES and NAMM. As luck would have it, or maybe not,
Elvis died just two years previously and a member of
his band and fellow Aussie, by the name of Bruce
Jackson, returned home looking for work. His mother,
Ryrie’s neighbour told him to check out the two guys
next door as they were doing something “musical”.
What he saw blew his mind and he immediately set
about getting Vogel and a functioning prototype
across the Pacific to LA. What happened next was a
serendipitous and hugely fortuitous chain of events
that saw the fledgling business take its first orders
from the likes of Stevie Wonder and word soon
spread to the UK, where Peter Gabriel fell for this new
musical tool, so much so that he set up a distribution
company with his cousin, Stephen Paine.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Fairlight CMI
became a household name, loved and despised in
equal measure for its revolutionary sound and
musical compositional capabilities as well as the fear
of making working musicians completely redundant.
But how did it work and what was inside that beige
mainframe that turned music production on its head?
Let’s take a look at the Series IIx, the most popular
and influential model, given its use of MIDI and
graphical on-screen sequencing via Page R.