Laurie Spiegel (born September 20, 1945 in Chicago) 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 also plays the guitar and lute
Spiegel was seen by some as a pioneer of the New York new-music scene. She withdrew from this scene in the early 1980s, believing that its focus had shifted from artistic process to product. While she continues to support herself through software development, Spiegel aims to use technology in music as a means of furthering her art rather than as an end in itself. In her words, "I automate whatever can be automated to be freer to focus on those aspects of music that can't be automated. The challenge is to figure out which is which."
Spiegel's realization of Johannes Kepler's "Harmonices Mundi" was chosen for the opening track on the "Sounds of Earth" section of the golden record placed on board the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Her piece called "Sediment" was used in the "cornucopia scene" of the 2012 movie The Hunger Games.
Best known for her use of interactive and algorithmic logic as part of the compositional process, Spiegel worked with Buchla and Electronic Music Laboratories synthesizers and subsequently many early, often experimental and prototype-level music and image generation systems, including GROOVE system (1973-78), Alles Machine (1977) and Max Mathews's RTSked and John R.Pierce tunings (1984, later known as the Bohlen-Pierce scale) at Bell Labs, the alphaSyntauri for Apple II (1978-81), the McLeyvier (1981-85).
Spiegel's best known and most widely used software was "Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument" (1986) for Macintosh, Amiga and Atari computers. The "intelligent instrument" name refers to the program's built-in knowledge of chord and scale convention and stylistic constraints.Automating these processes allows the user to focus on other aspects of the music in real time. In addition to improvisations using this software, Spiegel composed several works for "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 website.
In addition to electronics and computer-based music, Spiegel's opus includes 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.
Pursuing her concept of "visual music", she 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 their 2-hour science fiction film The Lathe of Heaven, both under direction of David Loxton.
During the 1970s Spiegel supported herself by both teaching and soundtrack composition, having steady work at Spectra Films, Valkhn Films, the TV Lab and for various individual video artists, animators and film makers. Spiegel did much less accompanitive music in the 1980s, focusing on creating music software and consulting in the music technology field, as well as additional teaching at Cooper Union and NYU.
Artist: Laurie Spiegel
Title: Unseen Worlds
Label: Scarlet Records
Traclist
1 - Three Sonic Spaces - One
2 - Three Sonic Spaces - Two
3 - Three Sonic Spaces - Three
4 - Finding Voice
5 - The Hollows
6 - Two Archetypes - I (Hall of Mirrors)
7 - Two Archetypes - II ( Hurricane's Eye)
8 - Sound Zones
9 - Riding the Storm
10 - Viroid
11 - Strand of Life
12 - A Harmonic Algorithm
13 - Passage
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