ABSTRACT
The technology that is the focus of this chapter is the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) and, more specifically, the CMI Series I and II. Its designers at Fairlight Instruments, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, were primarily interested in the use of digital synthesis to replicate the sounds of acoustic instruments. Their interest in using digital sampling to do so was the result of experimentation and failure. Early users of the Fairlight CMI like Richard Burgess, Kate Bush, and Peter Gabriel used digital sampling to record the sounds of everyday life – broken glass, rifles being cocked – and incorporated these sounds into recordings; Peter Howell and other members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop combined the sounds of acoustic instruments with random noises to create new libraries of sound effects for use on TV and radio: ‘Clarjang’, for example, was made from a clarinet sound and a metallic noise; without access to an instruction manual, hip-hop producers, Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Baker, and John Robie experimented with the pre-set sounds of the CMI’s sample library, but not to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments. These are examples of musicians using the instrument in unexpected ways and of users failing to follow the ‘script’ inscribed in the technical object.
