Laurie Spiegel (born September 20, 1945) is an American composer. She has worked at Bell Laboratories, in computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic music compositions and her algorithmic composition software Music Mouse. She is also a guitarist and lutenist. Spiegel's musical interpretation of Johannes Kepler's Harmonices Mundi appeared on "Sounds of Earth" section of the Voyager Golden Record. Her 1972 piece "Sediment" was included in the 2012 film The Hunger Games. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Education

Spiegel's early musical experiences were largely self-directed, beginning with the mandolin, guitar, and banjo she had as a child, which she learned to play by ear. She taught herself Western music notation at the age of 20, after which she began writing down her compositions. Spiegel attended Shimer College in Naperville, Illinois, through the school's early entrance program. She subsequently spent a year at the University of Oxford through an exchange program at Shimer. After receiving her bachelor's degree in sociology from Shimer in 1967, she stayed in Oxford for an additional year, commuting to London to study guitar, music theory, and composition with John W. Duarte. After moving to Manhattan, where she briefly worked in social sciences research and documentary film, she studied composition under Jacob Druckman, Vincent Persichetti, and Hall Overton at the Juilliard School from 1969 to 1972 and privately with Emmanuel Ghent. She subsequently became Druckman's assistant and followed him to Brooklyn College, completing her master's degree in composition there in 1975 and pursuing research in early American music under the direction of H. Wiley Hitchcock.

Career

Best known for her use of algorithmic composition techniques, Spiegel worked with Buchla and Electronic Music Laboratories synthesizers and digital systems including Bell Labs' GROOVE system (1973–1978), the Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer (1977), the alphaSyntauri synthesizer system for the Apple II computer (1978–1981), and the McLeyvier (1981–1985). Spiegel's best known and most widely used software was Music Mouse (1986), a self-described "intelligent instrument" for Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari computers. In addition to improvisations using this software, Spiegel composed several works using Music Mouse including "Cavis muris" in 1986, "Three Sonic Spaces" in 1989, and "Sound Zones" in 1990. She continued to update the program through Macintosh OS 9, and as of 2012, it remained available for purchase or demo download from her Web site. In addition to electronics and computer-based music, Spiegel has composed works for piano, guitar and other solo instruments and small orchestra, as well as drawings, photography, video art, numerous writings and computer software. In the visual domain, Spiegel wrote one of the first drawing or painting programs at Bell Labs, which she expanded to include interactive video and synchronous audio output in the mid-1970s. Spiegel was a video artist in residence at the Experimental Television Lab at WNET Thirteen in New York (1976). She composed series music for the TV Lab's weekly "VTR—Video and Television Review" and audio special effects for its 2-hour science fiction film The Lathe of Heaven, both under the direction of David Loxton. In addition to computer software development, starting in the early 1970s, Spiegel supported herself by both teaching and by soundtrack composition, having had steady work throughout the 1970s at Spectra Films, Valkhn Films, the Experimental TV Lab at WNET (PBS), and subsequently for various individual video artists, animators, and filmmakers. In the 1980s, she focused on developing music software and consulting in the music technology field, as well as teaching at Cooper Union and New York University. For her work she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2018). In 2018 Spiegel's early Music for New Electronic Media was part of the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 Exhibition, curated by Jon Cates. In 2023, she was awarded the Giga-Hertz Main Award for Electronic Music by the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for her life's work. In 2018, she began the process of digitally archiving her entire body of work.

Influence

Spiegel's writings on the importance of musical pattern manipulation on computer music interface design has influenced the design of live coding music software environments such as Tidalcycles.

Discography