CMI is a clean-room reconstruction of the Fairlight CMI Series IIx, the 1983 machine where the graphical sequencer and the digital sampler met in one box. The pointer is a light pen touching a green monitor — no mouse, no shortcuts. The system was organized into Pages. Page R, the Real Time Composer, is a brutally strict zero-latency grid — the rigid quantize widely credited with shaping the mechanical pulse of eighties pop. Page D shows a sound as a 3-D waterfall of waveform segments.
To feel the machine work, the room boots with RUTH — a re-creation in the manner of a 1985 track. The riff sits on track four — the Fairlight's CELLO2 sample, pitch-scooped and looped to fit the machine's roughly one-second memory ceiling. The other tracks carry a re-creation of the period's LinnDrum pattern. In the real session those drums lived on a separate LinnDrum, not inside the Fairlight — we map them onto Page R here so the whole thing plays as one honest sandbox, and we are telling you so.
The LOAD selector carries five sequencer files in all — re-creations in the manner of well-known recordings (their groove, key, and a hook), each at its own tempo. The codes — RUTH, TFTM, MAJOR TOM, III UNCLE, THE TREES — are winks, not credits: no copyrighted recording, title, or artist is reproduced. Past them the room is an instrument: ＋ ADD TRACK drops a blank track in any of nine synthesized voices, ▲ ▼ transposes a melodic line, ✕ removes it, and CLEAR ALL empties the grid so you can build from silence.
Built from scratch; no original code, ROMs, or copyrighted samples. The cello and drums are synthesized approximations. The pen-drawn waveform really does drive the timbre.
Trademark notice. Fairlight, CMI, and LinnDrum are marks of their owners; Classicery and Phil Renato claim no trademark or copyright interest in them and are not affiliated with them. The loaded sequences are re-creations in the manner of well-known recordings and reproduce no copyrighted audio, title, or artist; the selector codes are winks, not credits. The Fairlight's creators (Peter Vogel, Kim Ryrie, Tony Furse) are credited as historical fact, with no words put in their mouths and no likeness depicted. CART 018 / 027 · A-SERIES · TOOLS · circa 1983.
The cursor is a light pen — touch the glass. There are no keyboard shortcuts (the real machine worked this way). On a phone everything is a tap; the step grid scrolls sideways.
PAGE R · COMPOSER — the step grid, 32 steps across two bars. Tap a step to switch it on or off; PLAY runs the pattern in hard quantize, STOP resets to the top. The readout shows the step and tempo; each loaded file plays at its own BPM.
LOAD ▸ — five sequencer files: RUTH · TFTM · MAJOR TOM · III UNCLE · THE TREES (re-creations in the manner of well-known tracks — the codes are winks, not credits). Pick one and the grid reloads and the transport retunes to its tempo. CLEAR ALL empties every track to start from silence.
＋ ADD TRACK — choose a voice (KICK, SNARE, HAT, OPEN HAT, TOM, CLAP, RIM, BASS, CELLO) and a blank track appears. Melodic tracks (BASS, CELLO) show their note and carry ▲ ▼ to transpose by a semitone; ✕ deletes a track you added. The loaded tracks stay put; the ones you add are yours to delete.
PAGE D · WAVEFORM — the sound as a 3-D waterfall, attack nearest, decay receding. Leave the pen on VIEW to read it; switch to PEN: DRAW and drag across the screen to redraw the source cycle (historically this was Page 6). The stack re-derives and the cello's timbre changes the next time you play.
CHAPTERS tells the history; ROOMS jumps to any other cartridge; ABOUT is the disclosure. Switch on reduce motion in your OS to calm the phosphor flicker and still the waterfall — the room stays fully usable.
The Fairlight CMI came out of Sydney, built by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, who in 1979 put two things that had lived apart into one cabinet: a digital sampler — record a real sound, play it back across a keyboard — and a way to compose with it on a screen. It was not the first device to capture a digital sample; the Publison machines in France could do that around 1978, and sampling as an idea is older still in telecommunications. But the Fairlight is the box that brought sampling to musicians, and that is the claim worth making.
The engine underneath came from Tony Furse, whose QASAR M8 — a dual-microprocessor digital instrument — Vogel and Ryrie licensed and rebuilt. The interface was a green monochrome monitor and a light pen: you pointed the pen at the glass and the machine knew where you touched. There was no mouse. The pen was the pointer, which is why this room obeys the suite's no-shortcuts rule without bending it — the period interface already worked that way. (The Series I ran a pair of 8-bit 6800 processors; the IIx of 1983 moved to dual 6809s and added MIDI and SMPTE.)
The CMI's operating system was a stack of Pages, each reached by a short command. Some you typed at; some you drew on. Two became the machine's visual signature, and they are the two this room recreates: Page R, where you composed, and Page D, where you looked at the sound itself.
Page R, the Real Time Composer, arrived with the Series II software in 1982. It laid musical time out as a grid — tracks across, beats down, notes as blocks you placed with the pen — and it quantized everything hard to that grid, with no latency. It is widely credited as the first graphical pattern-based software sequencer, and the rigid, mechanical pulse it made easy is all over the records of the decade that followed. Page R is the music-side cousin of the non-linear timeline that film editing discovered in the same half-decade — time, laid out as a surface you reach into. (Read next door: Canon3, Track 09 — the timeline as a surface; and Canon4, Track 13 — Max and MSP, the dataflow descendant where boxes and patch cords make the sound.)
Page D showed a sampled sound as a three-dimensional waterfall: the waveform sliced into segments and stacked one behind another, so you could see the timbre evolve across the life of the note — the bright, harmonic-rich attack falling away into a darker decay. It is one of the most recognizable images in the history of music technology. Strictly, Page D was a display; drawing a single waveform by hand with the pen was Page 6, and editing harmonics additively was Pages 4 and 5. This room folds the drawing into the display so you can do both in one place — and now you know the seam.
To sample is to take something continuous and cut it into a list of numbers — exactly what Muybridge did to a galloping horse with twelve cameras, one medium over. Once a sound is a list, you can loop it, bend it, stretch it, and fill its gaps. The Fairlight's memory was tiny — about a second — so looping was not a trick but a necessity. The cart's theory wing, Canon3, follows that same verb from the horse forward.
The room boots with RUTH, a re-creation in the manner of a 1985 track. The lead line is the Fairlight's stock CELLO2 sample. As engineers have reconstructed it, the singer programmed a pitchbend onto the cello and then resampled the bent note back into the machine, so the pitch-scoop is shorter on the high notes and longer on the low ones — interpolation baked into the sound, which is the exact hinge this museum's motion volume turns on. The drums were a LinnDrum, programmed by her engineer (a session drummer added more later). They were a separate machine, not sequenced in the Fairlight; we map them onto Page R here so it all plays as one sandbox, and we say so.
The LOAD selector holds five sequencer files — RUTH, TFTM, MAJOR TOM, III UNCLE, THE TREES — each a re-creation in the manner of a well-known recording: its groove, its key, a hook, and its own tempo, rebuilt from scratch on Page R. The codes are winks, not credits; nothing copyrighted is reproduced. Past them, the room is an instrument. ＋ ADD TRACK drops a blank track in any of nine synthesized voices (kick, snare, hat, open hat, tom, clap, rim, bass, cello); ▲ ▼ transposes a melodic track a semitone, ✕ deletes one you added, CLEAR ALL empties the grid, and the waveform you draw on Page D becomes the cello's timbre. Load a file to learn the machine; then build your own.
Everything here is synthesized from scratch. There is no Fairlight code, no original ROM, no copyrighted sample — the cello is an additive approximation driven by the waveform you draw, and the drums are short bursts of synthesized noise and tone. It is a recreation in the manner of the instrument, not the instrument. That distinction is the whole point of a clean room.
No invented quotations from any real person. Living people are named only as historical fact. Drafted by Claude with Phil Renato, 2026.