The Fairlight CMI was the first widely-available digital sampling synthesizer, a computer-powered installation which defined the sound of countless tracks in the 1980s. Though offering powerful tools to record and shape your own instruments—the point of sampling!—in retrospect it's the presets that stand out. And ARR1, also known as Sararr, is among the most famous of them all. Here's the story of how it came to be, based largely on a post by Tom Steward, the man who engineered the sound using the real human voice of singer Sarah Cohen.
I was trying to get the sound of angels singing and wanted Sarah to sing more and more airy or breathy (as angels do). Some of this high-end 'air' was deliberately over-emphasised to compensate for the limited sampling bandwidth.
This was achieved by keeping the voice unchanged while varying the vocal tract so that the air component would be louder and more in-tune, or resonant, with the voice component (analogous to a low-pass audio filter being peaked just before the cut-off frequency). Microphone positioning was best when directly close-miked at around 40cms distance, capturing a balance of low voice and air.
Sarah would sing a note for several seconds while watching the guitar tuner to stay on pitch. I would sample midway through the note. It turned out that she didn't actually need the tuner because she had perfect pitch.
Here's a YouTube playlist of famous songs featuring ARR1. Below I embed Jean Michelle-Jarre's Zoolook, whose density of ARR1 is unmatched to this day.
Here's an interesting video showing the process of setting up the sound on a Fairlight CMI for use.
The first time I encountered ARR1 as an instrument was in crudely resampled form on the Commodore Amiga 500, maybe a decade after the CMI's introduction. By then a home computer and a copy of a floppy was all you needed to get the sound; things changed fast in those days.
Previously: Fairlight synth demonstrated by inventor in 1980