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The technological impetus for the Art of Noise was the advent of the Fairlight CMI sampler, an electronic musical instrument invented in Australia. With the Fairlight, short digital sound recordings called samples could be "played" through a piano-like keyboard, while a computer processor altered such characteristics as pitch and timbre. Music producer Trevor Horn was among the first people to purchase a Fairlight. While some musicians were using samples as adornment in their works, Horn and his colleagues saw the potential to craft entire compositions with the sampler, disrupting the traditional rock aesthetic. (Other
The technological impetus for the Art of Noise was the advent of the Fairlight CMI sampler, an electronic musical instrument invented in Australia. With the Fairlight, short digital sound recordings called samples could be "played" through a piano-like keyboard, while a computer processor altered such characteristics as pitch and timbre. Music producer Trevor Horn was among the first people to purchase a Fairlight. While some musicians were using samples as adornment in their works, Horn and his colleagues saw the potential to craft entire compositions with the sampler, disrupting the traditional rock aesthetic. (Others were also working contemporaneously toward this goal, such as Jean Michel Jarre, Yello, and Tony Mansfield, who had made extensive use of the Fairlight for the eponymous debut album by Naked Eyes').
In 1981, Horn's production team included programmer JJ Jeczalik, engineer Gary Langan and keyboard player/string arranger Anne Dudley. The team produced ABC's 1982 debut album The Lexicon of Love, increasingly using the Fairlight to tweak live-based elements of performance but also to embellish the compositions with sound effects such as a cash register's bell on "Date Stamp" (Dudley also cowrote a track on the album, which launched her scoring career. The team also worked on Malcolm McLaren's 1982 album Duck Rock and would go on to work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood on what would become the album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (realised predominantly on Fairlight).
During January 1983, Horn's team were working on the Yes comeback album 90125 - Horn as producer, Langan as engineer, and Dudley and Jeczalik providing arrangements and keyboard programming. During the sessions, Jeczalik and Langan took a scrapped Alan White drum riff and sampled it into the Fairlight using the device's Page R sequencer (the first time an entire drum pattern had been sampled into the machine). Jeczalik and Langan then added non-musical sounds on top of it, before playing the track to Horn. This in turn resulted in the Red & Blue Mix of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" single, which showcased the prototype sound of The Art of Noise.
Seeing further potential in the idea, Horn teamed Jeczalik and Langan with Dudley in February to develop the project and brought in one of his business partners, ex-NME journalist Paul Morley, as a provider of concepts, art direction and marketing ideas. Morley came up with the project name (taken from the essay "The Art of Noises" by noted futurist Luigi Russolo, and finalised at Jeczalik's request by dropping the final ‘s’). Much later, in a July 2002 article penned for The Guardian, Morley wrote "I loved the name Art of Noise so much that I forced my way into the group. If over the years people asked me what I did in the group, I replied that I named them, and it was such a great name, that was enough to justify my role. I was the Ringo Starr of Art of Noise. I made the tea. Oh, and I wrote the lyrics to one of the loveliest pieces of pop music ever, Moments in Love." Horn himself joined the new group as production advisor and provider of further ideas. This was the first time that he had been part of a group since parting company with his Buggles partner Geoff Downes (after they had been part of Yes). It would also be the first and last time that he would enjoy chart success as an artist since the New Wave hit in 1979 with "Video Killed the Radio Star".
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