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 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.
History
Origins: 1971–1979
In the 1970s, Kim Ryrie, then a teenager, had an idea to develop a build-it-yourself analogue synthesizer, the ETI 4600, for the magazine he founded, Electronics Today International (ETI). Ryrie was frustrated by the limited number of sounds that the synthesizer could make. After his classmate, Peter Vogel, graduated from high school and had a brief stint at university in 1975, Ryrie asked Vogel whether 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 1975, Ryrie and Vogel formed a home business to manufacture digital synthesizers. They named the business 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 synthesizer that was digitally controlled, as the competing Moog synthesizer was difficult to control.
After six months, the pair met the 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, it 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, they built what Ryrie called a "research design", the bulky, expensive, and unmarketable eight-voice QASAR M8 synthesizer, which included a 2×2×4-foot processing box and a keyboard.
Sampling
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 sound. He recalled in 2005:
Vogel and Ryrie coined the term sampling to describe this process. 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 creating office computers for Remington Office Machines, which Ryrie described as "a horrendous exercise, but we sold 120 of them".
Series I: 1979–1982
In addition to the keyboard, processing, computer graphics and interactive pen borrowed from Furse's synthesizer, the pair added a QWERTY keyboard, and a large 1×1.5×3-foot box stored the sampling, processing and ADC/DAC hardware and the 8-inch floppy disk. The biggest problem was largely considered to be the small 16 kB sample memory. To accommodate sample lengths from approximately a quarter of a second to an entire second, a low variable sample rate between 24 kHz and 8 kHz was used. The low sample rate introduced aliasing; however, Vogel felt that the low quality of the sounds gave them their own character.