Battlefield Earth: A Note for the Fairlight

[David Sheppard <david@master.org>]

Many falsehoods and inaccurate statements regarding L. Ron Hubbard and
the religion of Scientology have been observed on ars.
The purpose of this message is to give you a sample of the true data.


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"Yours is the fate of pioneers," remarked Ron to studio
musicians struggling to harness the Computer Musical Instrument
(CMI), and the statement is apt. True, the CMI is now de
rigueur; virtually all rap, for example, essentially qualifies
as computer music, while much of what is heard on Top Forty
stations likewise employs computers. Yet, the summer of 1982 had
indeed been a pioneering season for those at work with Ron's
Fairlight.

Originally conceived as a novelty and rarely seen beyond
experimental laboratories/trade shows, the Fairlight CMI had
been generally regarded as a "studio in a box." For suddenly one
could digitally record or "sample" any sound and present those
sounds through a keyboard as notes. Thus, a dog's bark or cat's
meow could be sampled, and turned into melody. (In contrast, the
synthesizer allowed one only to electronically imitate a sound
and the imitation was never true). In the beginning, however,
talk of the CMI was mostly limited to the sampling of musical
instruments, (and thus the possibility of a future without live
performances or even studio musicians). But as Ron so
presciently noted, "The potential of it is not being realized."
The CMI "will not put musicians out of work, it will spread
music even further."

To determine just how much further music might be spread, his
Fairlight was soon transforming a whole array of improbable
sounds into musical samples:  the thud of rocks, the buzz of
drills, the clang of a hoist bucket, the tinkle of bottles and
rustling leaves. Conceivably one could even take a revving
engine, he explained, "and weave it into percussion and rhythm."
Likewise, when scoring his musical rendition of a dancing
palomino, recordings of an actual palomino were fed into the
CMI. That is, as he detailed in a note to musicians, "Possibly
you may never have seen a horse show with horses dancing. They
circle and rear but in this case they circle and tap with their
two front hoofs. The melody in actual fact adapts to this
circling." Slightly more conventionally, if no less imaginative,
Ron's Fairlight was also employed to build counter-rhythms from
samples of Highland bagpipes and various African tribal
instruments.

Needless to say, his employment of the instrument soon captured
much national attention as a trend in the making. First publicly
heard at the California US Festival, a computer trade show/rock
concert, Ron's employment of the Fairlight was generally
regarded as a festival highlight.  Featured at his Battlefield
Earth booth, replete with appropriately costumed characters from
the novel, the US Festival provided an apt forum for the release
of the world's first computerized soundtrack to a book.  Hence,
the subsequent newspaper reports: "Movies have soundtracks, and
starting in October, so will books." Also clearly evident with
the unveiling of his work on the Fairlight was the advent of a
whole new era in musical production.

In recognition, then, of all that Fairlight represented as of
mid-1982, Ron eventually penned the following salutation to the
CMI itself.  It reads simply:

"Dear Sir Fairlight:

"Please have the engineer store on your floppy disc that we have
now been properly introduced. I am very glad to make your
acquaintance. You have very charming circuits and I am certain
that we can co-vibrate to the astonishment and ecstasy of a vast
audience. With all praise to your exulted frequencies, consider
me your friend."

L. Ron Hubbard


           For more information go to the following URLs:

                     http://www.scientology.org
                     http://www.lronhubbard.org
                     http://www.dianetics.org

  (c) 1996 Church of Scientology International. All Rights Reserved.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to L. Ron Hubbard Library for
permission to reproduce selections from the copyrighted works of L.
Ron Hubbard.

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