Remembering Fairlight, The DIY Musical Computer That Defined 80’s Pop Music

January 27, 2011, 11:30am

Earlier this week, BoingBoing charmed us with a couple of videos in remembrance of the Fairlight CMI, a machine so iconic that it defined the sound of an entire decade of popular music. Cobbled together entirely from readily-available hardware, the Fairlight’s young creators Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel hadn’t just hacked together the world’s first digital sampling tool — they had single-handedly sparked the genesis of DIY computer music.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the instrument that spearheaded the computer music revolution was a hack-job put together by two high school students. But that didn’t matter much to the countless musicians who popularized the earliest iterations of the Fairlight: Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel, Alan Parsons and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, to name a few. In a 1983 video demonstration of the machine, Gabriel spoke prophetically of “a new technology which is going to get very, very cheap” that would very soon “open up a new age of electronic skill.” His predictions, as we now know, were pretty much spot-on.

Videos by VICE

Even apart from technical capabilities, it’s easy to see why the Fairlight CMI – and its ORCH5 sample in particular – was so well-loved. Forget your current “iWorld” of capacitive touchscreens for a moment and imagine it’s 1979 and you’re using a computer synthesizer that allows you to actually draw waveforms onto the screen with a pen. Then imagine being able to take that waveform, or the waveform of a recorded sound, and modify it as you please.

Quincy Jones appropriately compared the process to sculpting.