The Fairlight CMI, which stands for Computer Musical Instrument, is a device that creates music, records sounds, and helps make music digitally. It was first made available in 1979 by the company Fairlight. The device used a license from the Qasar M8, which was developed by Tony Furse of Creative Strategies in Sydney, Australia. It was one of the first electronic music tools that included a built-in sound recorder and is known for helping create the term "sampling" in music. It became well-known in the early 1980s and was a competitor to the Synclavier made by New England Digital.
History
In the 1970s, Kim Ryrie, a teenager, had an idea to create a build-it-yourself analog synthesizer called the ETI 4600 for the magazine he started, Electronics Today International (ETI). He was unhappy with the limited sounds the synthesizer could produce. After his classmate, Peter Vogel, graduated from high school and spent a short time at university in 1975, Ryrie asked Vogel if he would help create "the world's greatest synthesizer" using a new type of computer chip called a microprocessor. Ryrie said, "We were always interested in computers—I built my first one when I was 12—and we believed combining computers with music was the right direction."
In December 1975, Ryrie and Vogel started a home business to make digital synthesizers. They named their business Fairlight after a hydrofoil ferry that passed near Ryrie’s grandmother’s home in Sydney Harbour. They planned to design a digital synthesizer that could create sounds similar to real musical instruments (a method called physical modeling synthesis). At first, they intended to build an analog synthesizer controlled by a computer, as the popular Moog synthesizer was hard to control.
- QASAR M8 [Multimode 8] (1974/1975) by Tony Furse
- QASAR M8 CMI [Multimode 8 Computer Musical Instrument] (1976–1978) by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel
By 1978, Vogel and Ryrie were creating sounds that were interesting but not realistic. To learn how to make realistic instrument sounds, Vogel recorded a short piece of a piano from a radio broadcast. He found that playing the recording at different pitches made it sound more like a real piano. In 2005, he said:
Vogel and Ryrie called this process "sampling." With the Fairlight CMI, they could now make many different sounds, but control was limited to adjusting attack, sustain, decay, and vibrato. Ryrie said, "We saw using real sounds as a compromise and not something to be proud of." They continued working on the design while also making office computers for Remington Office Machines, which Ryrie described as "a very difficult task, but we sold 120 of them."
In addition to the keyboard, processing, computer graphics, and interactive pen from Furse’s synthesizer, the pair added a QWERTY keyboard. A large box (1×1.5×3 feet) stored the sampling, processing, and ADC/DAC hardware, as well as an 8-inch floppy disk. The biggest problem was the small 16 kB sample memory. To store sounds lasting from a quarter of a second to a full second, they used a low sample rate between 24 kHz and 8 kHz. This low sample rate caused some distortion, but Vogel said the lower quality gave the sounds a unique character.
The Music Composition Language feature was criticized as too hard to use. Other basic aspects included limited RAM (208 kilobytes) and simple green-and-black graphics. Still, the CMI gained attention in Australia for its ability to mimic real instruments, its light pen, and its 3D sound visualizations. Vogel was unsure if there would be enough interest in the product. The CMI’s ability to copy real instruments led some to call it an "orchestra-in-a-box." Each unit came with 8-inch floppy disks storing 22 samples of orchestral instruments. The Fairlight CMI also appeared on the BBC science show Tomorrow's World. The Musicians' Union called it a "lethal threat" to its members.
In the summer of 1979, Vogel demonstrated the Fairlight CMI at the home of English singer Peter Gabriel, who was working on his third album. Gabriel and others in the studio were immediately interested and used unusual sounds like breaking glass and bricks on the album. Stephen Paine, who was present, said in 1996: "The idea of storing sounds in memory and changing their pitch in real time was very exciting. Before the Fairlight, everything used tape. The CMI was like a more reliable and flexible digital Mellotron. Gabriel was thrilled and used the machine right away."
Gabriel wanted to sell the CMI in the UK and formed Syco Systems with Paine to distribute it for £12,000. The first UK customer was John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, followed by musicians like Boz Burrell, Kate Bush, Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons, Richard Wright, and Thomas Dolby. The Fairlight CMI was also a hit in the US, used by artists such as Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Jan Hammer, Todd Rundgren, and Joni Mitchell. Musicians later realized the CMI could not fully match the expressiveness of real instruments, and sampling was better used for creative sounds rather than perfect copies.
The second version of the Fairlight CMI, Series II, was released in 1982 for £30,000. The sampler’s maximum sample rate increased to 32 kHz, reducing some distortion but only for short samples, as memory did not grow. The bit depth stayed at 8 bits. The CMI’s popularity peaked in 1982 after appearing on The South Bank Show, which documented Peter Gabriel’s fourth album. Gabriel used 64 kilobytes of samples from world music instruments and sequenced percussion.
The Fairlight CMI Series II became widely used in early to mid-1980s music. Common presets included an orchestra hit ("ORCH 5") and a breathy voice ("ARR 1").
Series II’s popularity grew because of a new feature called Page R, the first true music sequencer. This replaced the complicated Music Composition Language (MCL) used in Series I, making the CMI more accessible. Audio Media magazine compared Page R to the punk rock era, saying it helped make music creation more democratic for people without advanced skills. Page R allowed users to arrange notes horizontally and introduced concepts like quantization and cycling patterns. Roger Bolton, a CMI user, said, "The CMI II forced composers to make high-quality choices because of its limitations. It shaped the sound of the 1980s and how music was written." Fairlight continued improving the system, such as adding MIDI support in the 1983 CMI Series IIx, until the release of Series III in 1985.
The Series III sampler had many improvements. It could sample at 16 bits with a maximum rate of 44.1 kHz across 16 channels. Sample memory increased from 16 kB per channel to 14 MB total, a 56-fold increase. Design, graphics, and editing tools also improved, such as adding a tablet next to the keyboard.
Adoption
Peter Gabriel was the first person in the UK to own a Fairlight Series I. Boz Burrell of Bad Company bought the second one, which Hans Zimmer used for many recordings early in his career. In the United States, Bruce Jackson showed others how to use the Series I sampler for a year before selling units to Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder in 1980 for $27,500 each. Geordie Hormel, a person from a family that owned a meat-packing business, purchased two units for use at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles. Other early users included Todd Rundgren, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, producer Rhett Lawrence, and Ned Liben of Ebn Ozn. Ned Liben owned Sundragon Recording Studios and helped demonstrate Fairlight equipment in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River.
The first studio album to use the Fairlight was Kate Bush’s Never for Ever (September 1980), created by Richard James Burgess and John L. Walters. Stevie Wonder used his Fairlight during a 1980 tour to support the soundtrack album Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants", replacing the Computer Music Melodian sampler he had used for the recording. Geoff Downes used the Fairlight on Yes’s 1980 album Drama and during its tour. Later, he used it on the Buggles’ 1981 album Adventures in Modern Recording and with the band Asia in the studio and during live performances. Mike Oldfield used the Fairlight CMI often on his albums Five Miles Out and Crises. The first classical album to use the CMI was produced by Folkways Records in 1980, featuring composers Barton McLean and Priscilla McLean.
Peter Gabriel’s 1982 studio album also included the CMI. In 1981, Austrian musicians Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader composed a symphony called Erdenklang – Computerakustische Klangsinfonie. This piece was performed live on stage using five music computers at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. In 1984, the singer and songwriter Claudia Robot released an album titled Alarmsignal (Phonogram), which featured songs written by her and produced using the Fairlight CMI.
The first single in the U.S. made with a computer, the Fairlight CMI, was Ebn Ozn’s “AEIOU Sometimes Y” (Elektra 1983). This song was actually recorded in 1981–1982, along with their album Feeling Cavalier (Elektra Records 1984).
Devo’s 1984 album Shout used the Fairlight CMI heavily, reducing the use of traditional instruments. Gerald Casale later said that Shout was one of his biggest regrets because the Fairlight synthesizer influenced most of the album’s sound. Mark Mothersbaugh, the band’s frontman, later used the CMI in the 1991 children’s television show Rugrats. The instrument is most clearly heard in the show’s theme song, where it plays the “Swannee” sample with a low-pass filter applied.
Australian singer John Farnham used a Fairlight CMI on his twelfth studio album, Whispering Jack, between 1985 and 1986.
Influence and legacy
After the success of the Fairlight CMI, other companies began creating samplers. New England Digital updated their Synclavier digital synthesizer to include sampling, while E-mu Systems released a more affordable sampling keyboard called the Emulator in 1981. In the United States, a new company named Ensoniq introduced the Ensoniq Mirage in 1984. The price was $1,695, which was less than a quarter of the cost of other samplers at the time.
In America, Joan Gand of Gand Music and Sound in Northfield, Illinois was the leading salesperson for Fairlight. The Gand organization sold CMIs to musicians such as Prince, James "J.Y." Young of Styx, John Lawry of Petra, Derek St. Holmes of the Ted Nugent band, Al Jourgensen of Ministry, and many private studio owners and rock musicians. Jan Hammer, a spokesperson, performed the "Miami Vice Theme" at several Musictech pro audio events sponsored by Gand.
The widespread use of the Fairlight was so common that Phil Collins mentioned in the sleeve notes of his 1985 album No Jacket Required that "there is no Fairlight on this record" to clarify he did not use it to create horn and string sounds.
A Swedish warez and Commodore demo scene group named Fairlight took its name from the device, which Jean-Michel Jarre used on some of his recordings.
The experimental music group Coil described the Fairlight as unique and unmatched, comparing its use to "An aural equivalent of William Burroughs cut-ups."
In 2005, the Fairlight CMI was inducted into the TECnology Hall of Fame, an honor given to products and innovations that significantly influenced audio technology. In 2015, the Fairlight CMI was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia collection.
In February 2025, an Australian documentary titled The birth of electronic music: How the Qasar & Fairlight CMI pioneered computer music technology was released. It revealed previously unknown or incorrectly reported details about the Fairlight CMI.