In his obituary of the composer Adrian Sutton, Adam Sweeting mentions the Fairlight, which, in its earliest iteration, was not a synthesiser but a sampler. I did manage to program it to synthesise sounds, but it had to be left running overnight to produce eight of them, each as much as half a second long.
Goldsmiths was not the only – and not even the first – UK university to possess a Fairlight. At City University we bought one in 1980, and I used it for psychology experiments, while my fellow graduate students (including the composer Alejandro Viñao) pushed it to – and beyond – its limits in their electroacoustic compositions. It was also used extensively in many productions at the National Theatre in the early 1980s when the then head of music, Dominic Muldowney, asked me to work with him to create music and sound designs.
