本人在日本的论文节选（科学史专业），提及坂本龍一、船山基紀、冨田勲等著名音乐家

        刚刚惊闻“世界的音乐家”坂本龍一离世的悲报，现在仍沉浸在震惊之中说不出话... 面对突如其来的噩耗，也不知道作为一个音乐区up，我该如何纪念如此伟大的音乐家... 正好我最近完成的学术论文里就写到了坂本龍一，在这里就给大家分享一下我在日本完成的论文（科学史专业）的一部分节选吧。主要内容是“元祖采样器：Fairlight CMI在1980年代日本的受容”，其中提及了坂本龍一、船山基紀、安西史孝、松浦雅也、冨田勲等日本知名音乐家。这也算是我为研究坂本龍一的音乐作品所能做出的力所能及的贡献了。愿教授一路走好，此后再也无需忍受病痛的折磨，R.I.P.

2.4 The Introduction of Fairlight CMI into Japan

  Japan was advanced in terms of electronic synthesizer industry in the 1980s, and it was also in the 1980s that Japanese music industry had made a huge push into electronic and electronic instruments. As put above, Japan was the main source of users of Fairlight CMI as well.

  Among various users, 安西史孝 (Anzai Fumitaka) was the first musician to introduce Fairlight CMI into Japan. Born in a music family, Anzai entered the Roland enterprise in the 1970s where he was exposed to many advanced synthesizers, drum machines, as well as samplers. After hearing about the strong capacity of Fairlight CMI, Anzai made up his mind to travel to Australia to purchase one for himself. As mentioned earlier, the sales of Fairlight were almost achieved through acquaintanceship rather than retailing, because there were too few musicians being able to afford this instrument. After purchasing one unit of Fairlight, Anzai and three of his accompanies spent a week in Sydney, learning how to use this complex machine from the Fairlight employees. Kim Ryrie even remembered that “some rich Japanese customers came to us with credit cards, willing to buy [our Fairlight]” (田中 2001, pp529-537).

  After Anzai brought Fairlight CMI back to Japan, Naniwa Gakki (ナニワ楽器) in Osaka became the official sales agent of Fairlight CMI in Japan in 1982, with 松下電気貿易 (Matsushita) being the distributor (Fairlight Instruments n.d.). In fact, Naniwa Gakki had been willing to introduce some types of advanced instruments from abroad, with Synclavier [10] and Fairlight CMI being the main candidates. At last, Naniwa Gakki was able to become the official distributor in Japan. At the same time, it also imported other electronic instruments into Japan, such as the Simmons (electronic drums) and E-mu Emulator II [11] (digital sampling synthesizer) (田中 2001, pp547-548).

  Since then, many wealthy Japanese musicians had come to purchase this instrument, marking the prelude to the real popularization of Fairlight CMI and the concept of sampling in Japan. According to 山本隆彦, a friend of Ryrie, a total number of over 20 units of Fairlight CMI Series II and IIx, and about 30 units of Series III were sold in Japan. Among them, the first Fairlight CMI Series II was purchased by Panasonic and the second by 安西史孝as the leader of his band TPO. Other purchasers included famous musicians such as 東海林修、冨田勲、矢島賢、船山基紀、坂本龍一、日本大学、久石譲 and 林哲司 (田中 2001, p548).

 

 

 

 

  船山基紀 (Funayama Motoki) was the second musician to purchase Fairlight CMI and introduce it into the Japanese music scene (船山 2019, p150). Funayama was a pop music arranger active from the 1970s to 1980s. He studied pop music arrangement at Yamaha Music Promotion Association (ヤマハ音楽振興會) in his early years, and then entered the pop music scene in around 1974 (ibid., p341). In 1981, he travelled to the United States where he became acquainted with Fairlight CMI, the most advanced digital synthesizer at that time. In the United States, and decided to introduce it into Japan (ibid., pp147-148).

  In his autobiography published in recent years, he recalls that since the 1980s, electronic music has become increasingly popular in European and American pop music, so the composers with whom Funayama worked had felt a strong necessity to introduce more advanced electronic synthesized sound into Japanese popular music or 歌謡曲 (Kayokyoku). As a result, Funayama actively introduced Fairlight sound effects into Kayokyoku, starting with his works composed by 筒美京平 (Tsutsumi Kyohei), producing several best-selling singles and albums since 1984 until the late 1980s. In several songs, Funayama deliberately used Fairlight CMI in order to express the impression of “cosmic”, “future” and “science fiction”, who believed that the sharp sounds by sampling with Fairlight CMI fit pretty well with such intentions (ibid., pp150-152).

 

2.5 A Focus on Several Users in Japan of Significance

2.5.1 安西史孝

  In March 1982, Anzai brought Fairlight CMI back to Japan, but did not make its existence known to the public, instead keeping it within the studio for internal use only. At first, Anzai used Fairlight CMI to produce karaoke versions of many Japanese pop songs, and later orders from TV commercials and other record companies also increased. Anzai used typical Fairlight sounds such as the ORCH5 for these productions. In 1981, Anzai created the original soundtrack for the cinema version of the hit animationうる星やつら (Urusei Yatsura), which made him famous in the community of soundtrack musicians. This animation used purely electronic synthesized sound, especially Fairlight CMI, which was quite radical for a film soundtrack production at the time. The staff responsible for the sound effects of the animation were against this approach, but eventually Anzai was able to stick to his own idea (田中 2001, pp537-538).

  In 1983, Anzai formed an techno pop band called TPO and participated in the opening ceremony of Tokyo Music Festival (東京音楽祭). Soon, they made their official debut as a techno band through CBS SONY. At that time, SONY had just released its new CD player. Since TPO was a purely computer-based electronic band featuring Fairlight CMI, its aesthetics just matched SONY’s digital CD player, and thus naturally became the spokesman that SONY used to promote its CD player (ibid., pp538-539).

  In 1985, Anzai participated in the Tsukuba Expo under the name of TPO2. At this expo, many famous musicians composed electronic works for it. However, the band members of TOP2 soon realized the shortcomings of Fairlight CMI. Due to the extremely low sample depth of mere 8-bit, narrow dynamic range, and poor frequency quality, the tones sampled with Fairlight sounded terrible. So, they had to add many more sounds from analog synthesizers to compensate for such shortcomings. Moreover, by the time they tried to make their own album, they had become tired of the Fairlight sound, so they did not make serious use of Fairlight CMI. In the end, all they managed to create were pretty ordinary songs (ibid., pp539-541).

 

2.5.2 船山基紀

2.5.2.1 A brief biography of 船山基紀

  As a pioneer user of Fairlight CMI, Funayama was a pure pop music arranger. In the midst of working on compositions of Kayokyoku, Funayama was also faced with incomprehension from some musicians. Some thought that since Fanayama introduced such an advanced instrument, he should use it to make more Avant-Garde and experimental music, so why did Funayama insist on arranging merely pop music with Fairlight? In this regard, Funayama did not consider his works on Kayokyoku to be inappropriate at all. He believed that he had always been producing songs from the stance of a pop song writer. If he were to continue to use Fairlight, he would receive more and more orders from producers of pop singers (船山 2019, pp152-153). And this proved to be true, as many producers of pop singers later tied Funayama to the sound of Fairlight, believing that “Funayama's sound was exactly the sound of Fairlight CMI”, and thus he received more and more orders for popular songs (ibid., p156). Funayama soon received a huge success in the mid-1980s and late-1980s, eventually becoming the second best-selling arranger in Japan to date.

  However, Funayama was also aware of the limitations of Fairlight CMI, such as the difficulty in achieving some characteristic sounds from analog synthesizers. In the same time, the unique sound of Fairlight which was very “thin” in the high range and had very huge “音圧” (sound pressure) in the low and mid ranges, made it suitable for “explosive” and short percussion sounds like the orchestra hit (船山 2019, pp153-156). Another example is that many arrangers such as Funayama believed that strings were very difficult to synthesize in any case, so whenever strings were to be used in an arrangement, a specialized stringman must be hired to play real acoustic strings (ibid., p159). In addition, the use of electronic instruments like Fairlight CMI during that age took an inordinate amount of time. For the songwriting community which worked at an extremely quick pace in the 1980s, Funayama's work was very intense (ibid., pp153-156).

 

 

2.5.2.2 “Fairlight歌謡” that Swept the Japanese Popular Music Scene

  As said in Chapter II, the Fairlight purchasers in Japan had applied this expensive instrument into different genres of music prevailed in the 1980s. 安西史孝 used Fairlight to compose the original soundtrack of the cinema version of the animation うる星やつら as well as his own techno pop music for his band TPO. Like 安西史孝, 松浦雅也 also applied Fairlight CMI for his techno pop band PSY*S. 坂本龍一 applied Fairlight CMI mainly for his Avant-Garde and ambient electronic music. 久石譲 (Hisaishi Joe) also used Fairlight CMI to compose many original soundtracks (or image albums) for animation movies and his own album like Piano Stories and α BET CITY (Rittor Music 1987). 船山基紀, however, together with another famous arranger in the 1980s named 鷺巣詩郎 (Sagisu Shiro), used Fairlight CMI exclusively for pop music.

  With their active and extensive use of Fairlight sounds, the Japanese audience in the 1980s gradually got familiar with such cold, sharp, and in most cases sample-based digital sounds provided by Fairlight CMI. Although Fairlight sounds could be heard in all genres of music including pop, rock, ambient, Avant-Garde as well as in movies and commercials, it is in the world of popular music (and original soundtracks secondly important) that Fairlight sounds have achieved the greatest extend of impact. This is simply because popular music has the widest audience.

  During the mid-1980s, it was beyond doubt that Fairlight sounds had been incorporated into many hit songs, performed by the most famous super stars in the 1980s, mainly attributable to 船山基紀 who is now celebrated as the first person to introduce the advanced instrument into Japanese pop music scene as early as in 1984. In my personal interview with Funayama via E-mail, he had elaborated on how he used the Fairlight CMI in some of his major works since his introduction in 1984 until the late 1980s, as shown in Figure 3-1 and Table 3-1 below.

  船山基紀 had produced gorgeous and catchy tunes like techno pop based Kayokyoku (テクノ歌謡) from 1984 to 1985. And as early as in 1986, he began to produce “和製ユーロビート歌謡” which means Eurobeat songs exclusively produced by Japanese composers and arrangers. At that time, early electronic dance music (EDM) including Hi-NRG (high energy), Italo disco and early Eurobeat was popular in western world and was just about to sweep the Japanese music scene. Featuring Fairlight CMI as his “Ace Card”, 船山基紀 and his collaborator composer 筒美京平 became the very pioneer of Japanese Eurobeat, even comparable to the legendary British Hi-NRG producer team Stock-Aitken-Waterman.

 

 

2.5.2.3 My personal interview with 船山基紀 via E-mail

  I also had the opportunity to interview Funayama via E-mail and asked him many questions regarding his views on Fairlight CMI and its usage. He told me that he used Fairlight CMI in almost all of his works from 1984 to the late 1980s, together with other analog and digital synthesizers. Demonstrated in the following are the questions I asked Mr. Funayama.

 

(1) How would you describe the sounds of Fairlight CMI? For example, are the sounds sharper or more "crystalline", compared to traditional analogue synthesizers or other digital synthesizers at that time?

  “In my private impression, indeed Fairlight sounds sharp. When I first bought Fairlight in 1982, the sampling rate [sic] [12] was still only 8-bit (it became 16-bit just after that). Together with the low resolution and extremely short sampling time, the sampled timbres were rough and harsh, so they matched rock and funk music very much which required strong beats. Fairlight would create booming and blasting sounds easily, and instead it did not fit tender and soft songs.

  Regarding the utilization of Fairlight, I was personally influenced by Art Of Noise that compared to musical tones, I tended to use Fairlight to create percussion beats more frequently. Despite some preset sounds that Fairlight has offered like Grand Piano and Strings, I could not merely use these preset sounds to create great arrangements. Moreover, although Fairlight had offered functions like voice stretch and loop, I seldom used these functions.”

 

(2) Did you frequently use the preset timbres? (For example, the famous “ORCH5” as a typical sound from the Fairlight.) Or did you synthesize new timbres by yourself or other programmers?

  “As said above, it was not realistic to program or synthesize new timbres by myself due to the technical restriction of Fairlight. Therefore, the method to enlarge the type of sounds was to sample from short sounds in reality. Concerning the preset sounds, I used the Orchestra Hit sound very often, but other preset sounds were not usually applied.”

 

(3) Between "digital synthesis" and "digital sampling", which function do you believe to be more important and useful in the case of Fairlight CMI? Which function did you use more frequently?

 

  “It’s without doubt that Fairlight CMI is purely used as a ‘sampling machine’ instead of a synthesizer.”

 

(4) I got to know that you had arranged J-pop songs using Fairlight as early as in 1984. So, do you know how did the singers/record producers/the audience feel the sounds at the very beginning stage when electronic sounds were still rare in pop music scene?

 

  “No matter in the past or in the present, I believe that one must continue to pursue new sound in order to produce hit songs. As in the 1980s, indeed Fairlight sounded very new and shocking, so that I believe to have made special efforts to produce hit songs by using the Fairlight. Such sound must have shocked the music industry and music scene at that time, so that the request to me increased from that time on with a wider audience getting used to those sounds.”

 

(5) Did you consider the sampled sounds to be human-like or machine-like?

 

  “In the 80's I didn't recognize the need for them to be human sounds. This is because YMO [13] and other techno sounds and computer music were all the rage. As I said before, the sampling time at that time was very short, it was difficult to sample beats as it is now, and only short single sounds could be sampled. (As you know, now that computers are getting better, it's easy to program them as if they were played by humans.) So I was trying to create a mechanical sound that was previously unthinkable in the 80's. Even in the 80's, there was music that required human programming, so I tried to program as humanly as possible. However, I think that computers such as Fairlight and MC-4 [14] at that time could not exceed human performance. Therefore, I think it was inevitably oriented toward the pursuit of mechanical sound.”

 

(6) Did you consider your arranging works to be human-like or machine-like? Or a perfectly blend of such two values?

 

  “I can say my arrangement featuring the Fairlight had both ‘machine-like’ AND hopefully ‘human-like’ Sometimes mechanical, sometimes human, or both blend. Fairlight was the first step in making such a manufacturing method possible. I think it all depends on what kind of music humans want to make.”

 

 

 

(7) Could Fairlight CMI be used in live performance? Or was it a studio-only instrument?

 

  “Sometimes I rent my Fairlight IIci to the artist [C-C-B] for their live performance. But just a decoy. Fairlight was switched on, no audio cable was connected and keyboard player played Fairlight, and obviously no sound was heard. Just as a performance.

  Yes, Fairlight was ‘studio-only’ instrument. If You want use Fairlight in your live performance, you can set Fairjight just a few songs. 'Cause loading samples from disk took time. Very slow! Therefore, it is extremely difficult to play two or more songs in a row. As you might think, artists around this time used karaoke for this kind of music.”

 

(8) When you first introduced Fairlight CMI into Japan, what did you (and other musicians) call it?

 

  “A sampler as just another type of synthesizer.”

 

(9) When you first heard of the sampling function of Fairlight CMI, how did you feel over it?

 

  “Sampling is not always better than synthesis, (perhaps) because it just produced an imperfect copy of already existing sounds and could not create new timbres.”

 

(10) Many users of Fairlight CMI sampled human voice and played them back on different pitches on the Fairlight. How did you think of the playbacks of human voice?

 

  “They were not real voices anymore, instead they are electronic or artificially manipulated sounds.”

 

(11) When you sampled sounds from other instruments (e.g., percussion) using Fairlight CMI, how did you think of these sounds?

 

  “They became different sounds from the original in their essence, but such copies were not always better than the original, because they were imperfect copies of the originals. As I said before, because it's sampling time was short, sharp attack + short decay instrument was suitable for Fairlight in the 1980s. Slow Attack + Long Decay Instrument could not [be] sample[d] by Fairlight.”

 

(12) If you were to sample a sound from concrete sound in everyday life (e.g., a breaking glass sound sampled by Kate Bush in her song “Babooshka”), how would you think of the sampled concrete sounds?

 

  “I thought it's a[n] original sound. At the same time, I thought I could use this real sound as FX sound. If I use this in higher pitch, it will be excit[ing] sound. In more low pitch, it'll be dull sound. I could use it as I like with my taste. Most of my sample were edited, such as pitch, ADSR, by the effecter (delay, reverb, compressor, EQ).”

 

  Obviously, Fanayama preferred the sampling and Page R sequencing function provided by Fairlight CMI, just like other users. His works in popular music would be discussed in detail in Chapter III.

 

2.5.3 松浦雅也

  Among the purchasers of Fairlight in Japan was a recording studio called NEW*TON located in Osaka, with 松浦雅也 (Matsuura Masaya) as the CEO. Matsuura then became a well-known user of Fairlight CMI in the 1980s. One day, Matsuura heard a demo tape of Fairlight CMI from a salesman of Naniwa Gakki at the NEW*TON studio. Matsuura was so shocked by what he heard that he made up his mind to buy a piece of Fairlight, even though it was extremely expensive to afford. According to a later interview, Matsuura bought the Fairlight mainly in pursuit of “synthesizing a sound that no one had ever heard before” (田中 2001, p553).

  When he learned about the sampling capability of Fairlight CMI, he thought it was exactly what he hoped to express in his music. According to him, “Music made with synthesizers is quite inorganic and static; however, by using sampling technology, we can now create vivid and organic music.” After he introduced Fairlight CMI into NEW*TON Studio, he also received many orders ranging from theme songs for quiz variety shows to singles broadcast on FM radio. He also applied the Page R sequencer function very frequently. Later in 1985, Matsuura formed a band PSY-S and made their debut through CBS SONY, with Fairlight CMI as its main instrument (ibid., pp553-556).

  Matsuura was quite excited about the sampling feature and tried to sample many of the sounds by himself. But when it comes to the limitations of Fairlight, such as the Lo-Fi sound quality, Matsuura shared similar views as Anzai. It took Matsuura a long time to get used to the Lo-Fi sound of Fairlight in order to “cover up its imperfections”. For example, on their early recordings, one could hear a percussion sound sampled from a recording of a Russian folk song. In fact, it was such a Lo-Fi sound that many of their listeners hated. On their later album called Mint Electric, they used the cutting-edge Fairlight CMI III just to try to cover up the imperfections of the low-resolution sound of early Fairlight Series. As put above, with Fairlight Series III, its sound quality could finally become comparable to the CD standard. At the same time, with the advent of Series III, samplers were no longer a new thing at all (ibid., pp556-559).

 

2.5.4 坂本龍一

  坂本龍一 (Sakamoto Ryuichi) is currently a worldly renowned musician especially in the field of soundtrack music, but actually he also pioneered in experimental electronic music in Japan during the 1980s. In 1984, Sakamoto finished his new album called 音楽図鑑 (Ongaku Zukan), composed with the concept of “自動筆記” (automatic writing, aka. psychography) [15], together with a distinct tendency of minimalism music [16] (Rittor Music 2015, p13).

  In the documentary named Tokyo Melody, it could be clearly seen that Ryuichi Sakamoto had a Fairlight CMI in his studio. And in the mid to late 1980s, Sakamoto made extensive use of Fairlight CMI in his compositions, particularly with its sampling and sequencing functions (Lennard 1985). Regarding the album 音楽図鑑, many of the recordings were in fact completed already as early as in 1983. But after Sakamoto purchased the Fairlight CMI, he even took a lot of efforts to re-record all the tracks again with Fairlight CMI. According to Sakamoto, the strong capacity of Fairlight CMI lies in its concept of “integrated workstation”, which allows the musician to create music from nothing with only one machine providing sampling and sequencing functions (Rittor Music 2015, pp14-18).

  When it comes to the sound that Fairlight offers, Sakamoto believes that although the sample depth of 8-bit is very low by today's standards, such “cheap” sound is what makes Fairlight unique, just as the Art of Noise used in their works. The timbres of Fairlight CMI could be described as “plastic, artificial and virtual” in tone. Therefore, Sakamoto did not like to use Fairlight to mimic real sounds (obviously it could not do this either). Rather, Sakamoto sought to create mechanical, artificial and virtual music that would better exert the strength of Fairlight CMI. In a song called Paradise Lost, Sakamoto even sampled the voice of the famous musician 山下達郎 (Yamashita Tatsuro) by himself and applied these samples into the song. This was because Sakamoto felt that sample of Tatsuro Yamashita's voice, used as background harmonies, would perfectly match the “crystalline texture” of this song he wanted to express. Thus, synthesizers like the Fairlight CMI and YAMAHA DX7 [17] could be used as a source of new timbres, like new colors mixed on a palette. Sakamoto was not convinced that we would get to the stage of “pure digitalized” music in the 1980s. On the contrary, he believed that acoustic instruments such as the piano would still be widely used and they would never be replaced by digital electronic instruments (ibid., pp14-18).

  In the album 音楽図鑑, Fairlight CMI was extensively used. For example, in the song Tibetan Dance, Sakamoto sampled the sound of lute with Fairlight; in Replica, he sampled the concrete sound from a typewriter and the sound of a Glockenspiel; in the song Travel to the Extreme North (旅の極北), Sakamoto sampled the sounds of kick drum and snare drum; meanwhile, in M.A.Y. IN THE BACKYARD, Sakamoto used the famous orchestra hit sound; in both Paradise Lost and Self Portrait, the famous SARARR sound was applied (ibid., pp20-26).

  Sakamoto also used Fairlight CMI in his collaboration with Thomas Dolby, in the song called Field Work. Sakamoto also used Fairlight CMI on the live stage of the 1985 Tsukuba World Expo (ibid., pp42-43).

  Sakamoto particularly loved the percussion beats generated by Fairlight CMI, like those applied by the art-pop and new wave band the Art of Noise. He thought their drum beats sounded so cool that he decided to emulate them. Another reason Sakamoto valued Fairlight CMI was that he thought he could escape the limitations of traditional equal tempered music and create music in his own style, such as gamelan music that included a sort of pentatonic scale. In another version of the song Ma Mère l'Oye (マ・メール・ロワ), Sakamoto used the Fairlight CMI purely as a sampler. As mentioned earlier, although the depth of the 8-bit samples was terrible for music technicians, Sakamoto preferred the “bad and rough sound” produced by it and was quite excited instead. The “cheap” sound of the 8-bit samples became an exciting factor for Sakamoto (ibid., pp27-31).

  In Jun 7th 1985, Sakamoto made a special programme with the great poet and writer 吉本隆明 (Yoshimoto Takaaki) in which he demonstrated the basic function of Fairlight CMI and also invited Yoshimoto to compose a piece of music (See Figure 2-7 and 2-8). Firstly, Sakamoto applied the Page R Sequencer to compose the rhythm section including percussion and bass. Then Yoshimoto composed the melody, after which Sakamoto further made an arrangement using Fairlight CMI again. The following figures shows well about how the Fairlight CMI was used during the mid-1980s in a typical music studio, together with other trendy synthesizers like the YAMAHA DX7 (吉本 & 坂本 1985, pp134-145).

 

 

 

 

  Moreover, Sakamoto's 1985 album Esperanto also featured the Page R sequencer function provided by Fairlight CMI to create this pioneering work of “sample collage” and “remixing” art in the history of electronic music when combined with sampling function. In 1986, Ryuichi Sakamoto released the album 未来派野郎 (Miraiha Yaro) with futurism [18] as the main concept. The use of the YAMAHA DX7 and Fairlight CMI symbolized the vicissitude in human culture from analog to digital, just like Sakamoto himself said:

 

  "With regard to this album, we can observe the fact that the decade of 1980s was a period of innovation from analog to digital, that is to say, the materialized form had evolved into digital symbols, which of course had already taken place at the beginning of the 20th century, a vicissitude in man's own senses and consciousness. By applying sampling technology as a representation of symbolization, the use of Fairlight CMI and the digital synthesizer DX7 [in this album] has acquired a unique texture through rough digital recordings." (Rittor Music 2015, p56)

 

 

2.5.5 冨田勲

  冨田勲 (Tomita Isao) is celebrated around the world as well, mainly as a master of electronic classical music. However, when the sampler like Fairlight CMI was first introduced in the early 1980s, Isao Tomita was not so excited as many musicians. On the contrary, he did not recognize the necessity for samplers merely serving as a “substitute for the orchestra”. He did not like to reproduce the existing orchestral sound with samplers, but rather he was always trying to seek a new sound that he could manipulate freely according to his imagination (田中 2001, p171). This suggests that there was at least some conservative person like Isao Tomita in the music scene at the time, and their identity as “non-users”, or even “resistors” of a new technical artifact, deserves special attention. Such controversy or incomprehension brought by Fairlight CMI would be covered as well in the following chapter.

 

 

Notes:

[1] An oscillator is used to produce sound electronically by means of generating periodical vibrations.

[2] Literally, analog signal is the direct representation of the original mechanical signal, thus it is analogous to the original signal. That is why it’s named “analog” (Russ 2011, p50).

[3] Additive synthesis: a major type of sound synthesis in which the desired tone is synthesized by adding the sine waves corresponding to the fundamental frequency and overtones together. Additive synthesis is the most intuitive way of sound synthesis.

[4] Pulse code modulation (PCM): a type of modulation technique that converts the original signal into a purely digital form, which had been widely applied in telecommunications before PCM was adopted for electronic musical instruments (ibid., pp58-59).

[5] There are two main metrics that determine the quality of sampling: sampling depth and sampling rate. Sampling depth refers to how many bits are sampled at a time, while the sampling rate or sampling frequency refers to how many times of sampling are taken per second (Roads 2011, p24). The product of the two is the bit rate, i.e., the number of bits sampled per second. In general, the higher the bit rate, the higher the quality of the sampled sound is.

[6] When played back on instrument controlled by a sequencer, a sequence usually consists of short melodies with certain recognizable rhythmic patterns. The effect of a sequencer is reminiscent of the “ostinato” concept in classical music or the concept of “loops” in popular music (Perone 2022, p121; Vail 2014, p172).

[7] Quantization refers to the process to make the notes inputted into the sequencer to keep up perfectly with the rhythm and to synchronize among all voice channels. The idea of quantization was first introduced in 1978 by Roger Linn for his drum machine LM-1 (cf. Chapter III) (Vail 1994, p215). Without quantization function, for example, the notes you input might be “slightly faster” or “slightly slower” than you expect, since human cannot perceive and press the key on the music keyboard perfectly on time. Therefore, quantization helps the user to restrict the notes exactly on the “time-slots” in minimum time scale (Fairlight Instruments 1983b, pp24-25).

[8] CD Standard: i.e., 16-bit @ 44.1 kHz, meaning that every channel stores 44.1 kilos of sampling per second with 16 bits within every sample. Hence, the bit rate is 16bit*44.1kHz = 705.6kbps = 88.2KB/s (1 byte equals to 8 bit) (Roads 2011, p37).

[9] For a sample up to 2 minutes store in the Fairlight Series III, it occupied a memory of 48 kHz×16bit (=2B)×120s = 11.76 MB; doubled in stereo.

[10] Synclavier: an integrated workstation music synthesizer developed by New England Digital Corporation, with Jon Appleton as the leader, cf. Chapter III.

[11] E-mu Emulator II: one of the first relatively affordable digital samplers after Fairlight CMI, cf. Chapter III.

[12] Funayama actually meant “sampling depth” here.

[13] YMO: Yellow Magic Orchestra, a Japanese electro (techno) pop band consisting 細野晴臣（Hosono Haruomi）、坂本龍一（Sakamoto Ryuichi）and 高橋幸宏（Takahashi Yukihiro. They received great success during the late 1970s to the early 1980s and exerted huge impact on the development of electro pop music in the 1980s.

[14] MC-4: Roland MC-4 sequencer which was one of the most advanced digital sequencers in the decade of 1980s, cf. Chapter III.

[15] 自動筆記 (psychography): psychological concept which refers to artistic works created in the state of unconsciousness.

[16] Minimalism: a musical movement emerging from the 1960s to 1970s, whose musical aesthetic was inherited from German serialism as well as French musique concrete, with an apparent stress on repetition, loops and statism in terms of music (T. Holmes 2008, pp360-362). Many of Ryuichi Sakamoto's electronic music works of the 1980s embody a distinct minimalist tendency. For details, cf. Chapter III.

[17] YAMAHA DX7: an epoch-making digital synthesizer develop by YAMAHA in 1983. Utilizing the advanced frequency modulation (FM) technology, YAMAHA DX7 became a tremendous hit product in the popular music scene in the 1980s, eventually selling 200,000 units and becoming one of the best-selling electronic synthesizers of all time (Vail 2014, pp47-49; Pinch and Trocco 2002, p317).

[18] Futurism: an aesthetic movement that emerged in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century which strongly emphasized the imagery of speed, future, machinery, technology, and the metropolis. Luigi Russolo was the pioneer in terms of futuristic music who placed great emphasis on the aesthetics of “noise” (T. Holmes 2008, pp12-15).