I’m not sure about the whole Synclavier and Fairlight thing. I do know that the Fairlight wanted to use additive synthesis, but the quality was so crappy that they decided to record real sounds instead - it just tirned out to be a cool idea. I don’t know if Synclavier had the idea independently or subsequently to Fairlight. Many similar things happen at about the same time in different places. Like penicillin being developed simultaneously in different parts of the world. And I thought that while the Synclavier was initially more expensive, eventually both of them were just very very expensive, but I don’t know for sure.

On a separate note — I’m not actually sure about Wikipedia’s version of the early history of the digital sampler. For one thing, the Fairlight CMI article claims that the Synclavier team only added sampling when they found out the Fairlight could do it. That *may* be the case, but when I last spoke with Jon Appleton from Dartmouth, I got the sense that they were basically developing the concept at the same time, and the Synclavier actually beat the Fairlight to market with a hard drive option. And regardless, there are some important citations missing there. (Hey, it’s Wikipedia; that’s the fun of it.) The short version of the story, of course — as with the early computer pianola experiments — is that various people were working toward similar goals, which is why “first” tends not to be meaningful outside record books.

The Synclavier was wildly expensive, yes. It was more like a custom/modular system than the Fairlight in that you could custom-order what you wanted, but yeah, still an order of magnitude beyond the Fairlight.

But, being the first is not so important. The Ferranti music was a curiosity. With CSIRAC it was an early programming challenge, and it was used politically to try and save the project by popularising the computer. Unfortunately neither had composers involved… That’s where Max Matthews and co. got it right. They had a DAC, and did DSP, and then they got composers involved because as engineers they didn’t know much about music…

CSIRAC’s sounds are a kind of digital synthesis, just not controllable with timbre, as it was feeding digital pulses from the buss to the speaker. MUSIC I also had a fixed waveform for all synthesis. MUSIC III did the real thing, and that was the real start of computer music.

I’m also fascinated that after building a fantastical magic machine, ie. a computer in the ’50s, one of the first things they did with it was get it to make some noise…