Message: Obituary of Adrian Sutton | music

In his obituary for composer Adrian Sutton, Adam Sweeting mentioned the Fairlight, which, in its first version, was not a synthesizer but a sampler. I was able to program it to synthesize sounds, but had to leave it running overnight to produce eight of them, each half a second long.

Goldsmiths was not the only British university – nor even the first – to achieve Fairlight certification. At City University we bought one in 1980, and used it in psychology experiments, while fellow graduate students (including composer Alejandro Finao) pushed it to – and beyond – its limits in their electroacoustic compositions. It was also used extensively in several productions at the National Theater in the early 1980s when the then Head of Music, Dominic Muldowney, asked me to work with him to create musical and sound designs.