Digital Sampling

The Design and Use of Music Technologies

Paul Harkins

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351209946
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Technology & Engineering
• Thema: Acoustical Engineering

Digital Sampling is the first book about the design and use of sampling technologies that have shaped the sounds of popular music since the 1980s.

Written in two parts, Digital Sampling begins with an exploration of the Fairlight CMI and how artists like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel used it to sample the sounds of everyday life. It also focuses on E-mu Systems and the use of its keyboards and drum machines in hip-hop. The second part follows users across a range of musical worlds, including US/UK garage, indie folk music, and electronic music made from the sounds of sewers, war zones, and crematoriums.

Using material from interviews and concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Digital Sampling provides a new and alternative approach to the study of sampling and is crucial reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including music technology, media, communication, and cultural studies.

___________PART I___________

INSTRUMENTS

ONE

Tomorrow’s Music Today

The Fairlight CMI Series I and II

My focus in this chapter is the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) and, more specifically, the CMI Series I and II. As outlined in the introduction, 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. As a result of failure and serendipity in the design process, they ended up using digital samples instead. Unimpressed by the fidelity of its pre-recorded sounds, Richard Burgess used the CMI to record ‘the sounds of everyday life’, incorporating them into recordings for Kate Bush; composer Peter Howell and other members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used its sampling function to combine the sounds of acoustic instruments with random noises, creating new instruments and libraries of sound effects; without an instruction manual, hip-hop producers, Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Baker, and John Robie, experimented with the pre-set sounds of the 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, what Madeleine Akrich refers to as, the ‘script’ inscribed in the technical object. To understand these objects, Akrich writes, ‘[W]e have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer’s projected user and the real user’ (1992, pp. 208-209). In this chapter, I draw on archival research and interviews to focus on both the designers and the projected/actual users of the Fairlight CMI. However, I want to start by taking Trevor Pinch and Karen Bijsterveld’s advice and begin by ‘follow[ing] the instrument[s]’ (2004, p. 639).

Following the Instrument: The Fairlight CMI Series I

The Fairlight CMI consisted of a large Central Processing Unit (CPU) with two microprocessors and two 8-inch floppy disk drives, a QWERTY keyboard with a monitor, and two six-octave keyboards (Figure 1.1). There were three ways that users could generate new sounds with the instrument: sampling external sounds, using additive synthesis, or drawing waveforms with a light-pen attached to the monitor. The light-pen was successful with audiences at Audio Engineering Society (AES) conventions where the CMI was demonstrated to potential customers but irked rival companies who rejected it as a gimmick. Cameron Jones of New England Digital (NED) dismissed it by saying that ‘[u]sing a light-pen to draw a visual representation of a sound wave is kind of like using a pencil to draw a high-resolution JPEG image’ (quoted in Milner 2009, p. 317). Roger Linn was blunt:

Figure 1.1 Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) Series I

It was completely useless, a stupid idea, because you’re only going to get very odd and bad harmonics, which was emphasised by the fact that [the] Fairlight’s sampling rate and bit width was so low. It was a feature they kept talking about, like you could ‘make any sound,’ but imagine making any sound by drawing a waveform. It’s just impossible.

(quoted in Milner pp. 317-318)

While engineers criticised the non-user-friendly interface of a monitor and light-pen, musicians like Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock were interested in the opportunity to make music with touch-screen technology. Gabriel described his experiments with it:

Figure 1.2 Fairlight CMI Control Page 6 (Waveform Drawing) with Light-Pen

You have a sort of TV screen, which you work with so you’re working to some extent with the waveform. You have a light-pen that you can use to programme the waveform on to the screen and you get a considerable amount of control over the sound like that. So, as they develop the visual correspondence I think it will become easier. At the moment it does take a little time to get the hang of it, but I think it’s within anyone’s grasp if they have the time available.

(quoted in St. Michael 1994, pp. 81–82)

Hancock was effusive with praise about the light-pen and the instrument more generally:

The use of the light-pen and all the different screenings and menus you have available, and the different ways in which you can manipulate sound, are incredible. The fact that you can draw your waveforms, loop any points you want, and merge different waveforms together is fantastic. There’s nothing even close to that as far as I know.

(quoted in Keyboard Staff 1983, p. 53)

Despite this enthusiasm, users did not overcome the difficulties of creating sounds with the light-pen and it was discontinued when the CMI Series III was launched in 1986.

As well as the use of a light-pen to draw waveforms, the sounds of acoustic instruments could be played on the keyboards of the Fairlight CMI using the library of pre-recorded samples stored on one of two 8-inch floppy diskettes. In an article in New Scientist magazine, Giles Dawson wrote: ‘Insert a systems disc in the left-hand drive, a library disc in the right, and you can explore a world of sound limited only by your imagination’ (1983, p. 333). Rather than being used to create ‘any sound you can imagine’, there were fears about how the Fairlight CMI and other digital synthesizer/sampling instruments would be used to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments. For this reason, trade unions representing the economic interests of performing musicians did not welcome them.¹ In the UK, the Musicians’ Union (MU), which has traditionally campaigned about issues relating to the live performance of music, was concerned with protecting the rights and employment opportunities of its members.² Their spokesperson, Maurice Jennings, suggested: ‘If you want the sound of violins, book violins; if you want the synthesizer sound, we’ve no objection to synthesizers’ (quoted in Dawson, p. 334). Many musicians, though, wanted to find out how synthesizers like the Fairlight CMI could be used to digitally reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments like violins and how ‘faithfully’ they could do so.

Along with the pre-recorded library, external sounds, including the performance of acoustic instruments, could be recorded or ‘sampled’ using a microphone or line input. Electronic music composer Eberhard Schoener, an early adopter of the Fairlight CMI, was evangelical about the instrument and its use for imitating orchestral sounds:

The Fairlight is incredible. . .you can make a sound that is just like – snaps fingers – which you can programme and make a whole symphony from. You keep a library of sounds on floppy disc. So, with a Fairlight you can have a Steinway piano sound or whatever you want. You can blend and shape sounds however you wish.

(quoted in Denyer 1980, p. 16)

However, with a sample rate of 24 kHz, it was difficult to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments with a level of fidelity that satisfied users who were experts in the field of recorded sound. In a report delivered to the 1980 International Computer Music Conference, audio data consultants, Steve Levine and J. William Mauchly, concluded:

Steinway needn’t worry about competition from this instrument. In general, the Fairlight offers an enormous palette of sounds to the musician, but it can’t do everything. Like a camera, the CMI becomes transparent to the viewer, with no characteristic sound of its own.

(1980, p. 566)

Despite the fears of organisations like the MU, the use of the Fairlight CMI to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments with a level of fidelity acceptable for some users was not possible. This was because of its technical constraints or, to use James J. Gibson’s (1979) term, the ‘affordances’ of the technology.³ These restrictions were the result of the high price of microprocessors and the availability of Random Access Memory (RAM). The sample time on the Fairlight CMI Series I also meant the length of sounds that could be digitally recorded and reproduced was limited to one second.

As well as issues over the sound quality of its samples, one of the other reasons users found it difficult to replicate the sounds of acoustic instruments was because the Fairlight CMI was a keyboard-based instrument. It was based on the same way of organising sound as an older technology, the piano.⁴ While some users struggled with typing instructions on the QWERTY keyboard, its successful adoption by other users was due to the inclusion of its two piano keyboards.⁵ Richard Burgess, who used a Fairlight CMI on the recording sessions for Kate Bush’s Never for Ever (1980) album, told me about the design interfaces of analogue synthesizers and the problem of using them to generate sounds without a keyboard. His first synthesizer, the EMS Synthi A, was built into a plastic briefcase consisting of aluminum knobs, a matrix, and a joystick-like controller but did not have a touch-plate keyboard like the Synthi Aks.⁶ In comparison, the inclusion of piano keyboards with a digital synthesizer like the Fairlight CMI

. . .made it easy for people to relate to it. I’ve played keyboards on tons of records but I’m not a great keyboard player by any means. That’s one of the reasons why I liked the whole computer thing. I could play the part, programme it, and fix the mistakes. It made it good. For instance, on the Kate Bush sessions I’d programme stuff and I played all the percussive parts but if there was a melodic part someone else would play it. It was obviously a smart move putting a keyboard on the front of it so that it was relatable to anybody.

(Burgess 2011)

Sounds could be played on the Fairlight CMI using the same gestures as other keyboard instruments, but users encountered problems when trying to imitate the sounds of stringed or brass instruments. Stephen Paine, cousin of Peter Gabriel and co-owner of Syco Systems, recalled: ‘It became clear after a while that it was impossible to achieve the expressiveness with a keyboard that players of acoustic instruments have with finger and/or mouth control’ (quoted in Tingen 1996a, p. 50). Using the Fairlight CMI to replicate the sounds of orchestral instruments involved practical difficulties that resulted in users experimenting with it in ways that had not been envisaged by its designers.

Following the Designers (and Distributors): Peter Vogel, Kim Ryrie, and Bruce Jackson

Few could have predicted that the first commercially available digital synthesizer/sampling instrument would be designed in Australia. Burgess was involved in the development of drum synthesizers and electronic drum kits like the Simmons SDS-5 in the late 1970s, as well as being an early user of the Fairlight CMI:

You could not have expected that anyone would come up with a device like that at that time, I don’t think, and certainly not from Australia. You would have thought it would have come out of one of the major universities like MIT or Stanford or IRCAM or somewhere like that.

(Burgess 2011)

The development of digital synthesizer/sampling technologies might also have been expected to occur first in the Far East.⁷ However, as Ralph Denyer described in an article in Sound International in May 1980, Fairlight Instruments had an advantage:

Although several manufacturing companies have built prototype digital synthesizers and circulated technical data at exhibitions, the Australian Fairlight company have pipped the Japanese, Europeans, and [original emphasis] the Americans to the post by getting their instrument into production first.

(p. 16)

While the designers of the Synclavier and the Computer Music Melodian worked in the engineering department at Dartmouth College and the electronic music studio at University of Pennsylvania respectively, Fairlight Instruments grew from a looser arrangement of social and family networks. The initial design of the Fairlight CMI was the result...