Fairlight CMI (1979)
Sampling
Synthesizers computed sound — the Fairlight CMI simply recorded it: a digitized signal landed on the keys, and any recording became an instrument. The musicians' union called it a lethal threat.
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Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie built their machine in Sydney, on the basis of engineer Tony Furse's QASAR M8 prototype. It ran against the whole logic of synthesis: instead of computing a waveform from a formula, the Fairlight CMI passed live sound through an analog-to-digital converter and laid the recording out across the keys. Inside were 8-bit Motorola 6800 processors and eight voices of polyphony, each on its own circuit board. This was the first commercially available digital sampler. Contemporaries dubbed it a "digital Mellotron" — but the Mellotron lacked the main thing: here, waveforms were edited with a light pen right on a CRT monitor. Sound was literally drawn on screen.
The second magnet was Page R — a visual sequencer by programmer Michael Carlos, inspired by the patterns of the Linn LM-1 drum machine: rhythms were assembled with the same light pen on a time grid, years before MIDI sequencers. A system cost $25,000 to $36,000; Mick Jagger, on hearing the price, reportedly remarked: "Man, that's a lot of bread." Few could afford a Fairlight: Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Herbie Hancock, Jean-Michel Jarre. Peter Gabriel was impressed enough to become the company's distribution partner in the UK.
The idea of a "computerized orchestra" frightened the industry: Britain's Musicians' Union called the CMI a lethal threat to its members, and in May 1982 passed a resolution barring union members from playing synthesizers, drum machines or any electronic device "capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments" — the trigger was not the Fairlight but a Barry Manilow tour. The resolution was never once enforced and was dropped in 1997; what broke Fairlight was the market: by the late 1980s the cheaper E-mu Emulator, Ensoniq Mirage and Akai S1000 crushed the monopoly, and in 1988 Fairlight stopped making instruments, moving into film and television post-production. The panic, though, stayed in history — the first alarm that automation would take musicians' jobs, forty years before neural networks.