Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Mar. 06 2002, 16:30 |
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The company does detail a little of their history there. They're obviously trying to focus on their new products that they're trying to sell (among them the Merlin hard disk recording system which Mike currently uses), so the CMI doesn't seem to get much of a mention.
The Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument) was created at a time when analogue synthesisers still firmly ruled the world of electronic music. In 1975, two Australians, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie founded the Fairlight company, named after a hydrofoil that sailed in Sydney Harbour. Their aim was creating a digital muscial instrument, and they achieved this with the Quasar M8, an 8 voice polyphonic synthesiser based on a design by Tony Furse. They experimented with using the instrument's processors to generate waveforms in real time, but found the results to be unsatisfactory, so they instead turned to using samples in the place of waveform generators, and the CMI began to evolve. The ability to sample was what the CMI became famous for, even though its capabilities extended far beyond that - sequencing and additive synthesis were some of the other strings to its bow...I'll cover the rest in another post (or I might just edit this one and add the extra info) - the thinking part of my mind has switched off for the night...
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