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 Harmonice 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 was born on September 20, 1945, in Chicago. Her 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 became interested in electronics after using a tape-operated computer at Purdue University as part of a high school class field trip. At the age of 20, she taught herself Western music notation, 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, the Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer (1977), the alphaSyntauri synthesizer system for the Apple II computer (1978–1981), and the McLeyvier (1981–1985). In various pieces, Spiegel has used musical algorithms to simulate natural phenomena, emulate tonal harmony rules of earlier musical eras, and sonically represent large data sets. In her 1977 piece Improvisation on a Concerto Generator, she used an algorithm designed to replicate Johann Sebastian Bach's "chorale-style harmonic progressions." Spiegel views algorithmic music as a natural extension to the rule-based systems of traditional Western music, such as counterpoint and voice leading, and her ultimate goal in using such techniques is to automate logical musical tasks so that she can "focus more completely on the aspects of music that I cannot reduce to logic." 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. In 2026, Spiegel rereleased Music Mouse in partnership with Eventide.

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. As a self-proclaimed lover of emotional music, Spiegel thoroughly enjoyed her brief work as a soundtrack composer : "When you do soundtracks," she claims, "all that really matters is emotional content."

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 ZKM 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.

Artistry

Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork said: "With a programmer’s eye for detail, Spiegel renders both extended drones and folk-inspired counterpoints in the simplest of terms."

Influence and activism

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.

Spiegel is an outspoken animal rights activist, and she has sought throughout her career to raise awareness for "underprivileged and disparaged" animals within urban landscapes, such as mice, rats, and pigeons. She first learned to care for pigeons as part of a college psychology course, and she began rehabilitating injured birds in Tribeca after the September 11 attacks. In 2004, Spiegel started a personal effort to regularly feed local pigeons so that they could have "species appropriate" meals, and as of 2024, she continues to feed pigeons almost daily in Manhattan's Duane Park. She believes that the tools of computer music, such as her own Music Mouse software, can lower the monetary and temporal barriers to entry that has been historically associated with music production.

  • Music for New Electronic Media, 1977. Early works by several electronic composers.

Notes

References

  • Resident Visitor: Laurie Spiegel's Machine Music by Simon Reynolds
  • Papers Writings on technology and the arts by Laurie Spiegel
  • Biography at the National Women's Hall of Fame
  • Biography on Vox Novus
  • Joanna Bosse, "Laurie Spiegel". Grove Music Online (subscription access).
  • EMF Media: Laurie Spiegel, by Kyle Gann
  • Interview from 1979, including complete versions of Patchwork, Waves, The Orient Express and Expanding Universe
  • IMDB Listing of Laurie Spiegel film soundtracks
  • Laurie Spiegel Interview NAMM Oral History Library (2017)
  • Interview with Laurie Spiegel on sexmagazine
  • Interview with Laurie Spiegel on Tokafi
  • The Different Computer of Laurie Spiegel on radiom
  • Rare ’70s Electronic Music Is Hidden in The Hunger Games on Wired