Tech Time Warp of the Week: Herbie Hancock Drops Fancy Electronic Beats on Sesame Street

These days, computers often take the stage. In fact, some electronic musicians perform entire shows from their laptops. But in 1983, when Herbie Hancock appeared in an episode of Sesame Street and showed off an early digital audio sampler called the Fairlight CMI, this mix of computers and music was still a new thing. A wonderfully new thing.

You can see Hancock’s Sesame Street moment in the video above. He begins by recording one girl’s voice and playing it back in a variety of pitches (and yes, that’s Tatyana Ali, who went on to co-star alongside Will Smith on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). Then he showed them how the computer could visualize audio wave forms, alter the sound of someone’s voice through audio effects, and even play multiple different sounds at once.

Today, you can download free apps for your smartphone that can transform sound in more sophisticated ways than the CMI could. The original model, introduced in 1979, didn’t even support CD-quality audio. But at the time, it was revolutionary. It helped pave the way to bring computers into every aspect of life, not just business, and set the stage for almost all electronic musical instruments that followed. “Sampling, graphic sequencers, multitimbrality, software-based synthesis and the concept of the ‘workstation’ can all be traced back to this instrument,” wrote musician Norm Leete for Sound on Sound magazine in 1999.

The main problem was that the CMI cost in the neighborhood of $20,000, which would be about $48,000 today. Yet many musicians were happy to shell out for one, including Kate Bush, Coil, Duran Duran, Peter Gabriel, Ministry, Stevie Wonder, and Yes. That’s largely because the CMI’s software interface, which was its most compelling feature. It included both a music keyboard and QWERTY keyboard, and it had a light pen interface that prefigured today’s touchscreen interfaces. You draw notes directly on the screen, as Hancock shows fellow musician Quincy Jones in this excerpt from the documentary I Love Quincy:

Ultimately, the CMI’s user friendliness wasn’t enough to save Fairlight Instruments from bankruptcy. But the CMI still crops up in contemporary music. A member of the Nine Inch Nails side project How to Destroy Angels can be seen playing one in the the 2012 video for the song “Ice Age.” The machines still fetch a pretty penny, but Fairlight co-founder Peter Vogel’s new company sells a virtual version for iPhones and iPads, and UVI offers a CMI inspired plugin for modern audio software applications.