The Fairlight CMI helped change recorded sound from something musicians played back into something they could play.
Developed in Australia by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie and released at the end of the 1970s, the system became one of the first commercially influential digital sampling instruments. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia describes it as the world’s first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer.
By modern standards its early sampling capacity seems tiny.
Jean-Michel Jarre has recalled working with a maximum sample length of roughly 0.8 seconds at 8-bit resolution on an early Fairlight.
Yet that fraction of a second was enough to change composition.
A voice could become a chord.
A broken object could become percussion.
A sound recorded somewhere in the world could be mapped across a keyboard and played at pitches that had never existed in the original recording.
Today we can load hours of high-resolution audio into a laptop without thinking about memory.
That abundance makes it easy to forget how radical 0.8 seconds once was.
The important technological breakthrough was not duration.
It was separation.
For the first time, a tiny recorded fragment could be detached from the event that produced it and treated almost like an oscillator.
Less than one second of memory was enough to introduce an entirely different idea of what an instrument could be.
https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/item/sampling-sounds-fairlight-cmi
