Laurie Spiegel facts for kids

Laurie Spiegel in an electronic music studio

Laurie Spiegel (born September 20, 1945) is an American composer. She is famous for her electronic music and for creating computer software that helps people make music. She also worked at Bell Labs, a famous research company, and helped create computer graphics. Besides her computer work, Laurie is also a talented guitarist and plays the lute.

One of Laurie Spiegel's musical pieces, based on Johannes Kepler's ideas about the universe, was chosen for the "Sounds of Earth" section of the Voyager Golden Record. This record was sent into space on the Voyager spacecraft for any aliens to find! Also, her 1972 song "Sediment" was featured in the 2012 movie The Hunger Games.

Laurie Spiegel has been recognized for her achievements and is now part of the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Learning Music and Computers

Laurie Spiegel started her musical journey on her own. As a child, she learned to play the mandolin, guitar, and banjo just by listening. Her interest in electronics began when she used a computer at Purdue University during a high school trip. When she was 20, she taught herself how to read and write music, and then she started writing down her own songs.

She went to Shimer College early and also studied for a year at the University of Oxford in England. After college, she continued to study guitar and music in London.

Later, Laurie moved to New York City. She studied music composition at the Juilliard School, a very famous music school, from 1969 to 1972. She felt a bit different from other students there because she was more interested in the feelings and structure of music, while others focused on very modern, experimental sounds. However, she found other musicians to work with in shared studios, like the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where she could explore her ideas.

She earned her master's degree in composition from Brooklyn College in 1975.

Creating Music with Technology

Laurie Spiegel is well-known for using something called "algorithmic composition." This means she uses rules or steps, like a recipe, to create music with computers. She worked with early electronic music machines called synthesizers, like those from Buchla and Electronic Music Laboratories. She also used digital systems, including the GROOVE system at Bell Labs and the alphaSyntauri system for the Apple II computer.

In her music, Laurie used algorithms to copy sounds from nature, create music that sounded like older styles, or even turn large amounts of information into sounds. For example, in her piece Viroid, she used the genetic code of a tiny organism to decide the notes a synthesizer would play. She also created a piece called Improvisation on a Concerto Generator that used an algorithm to make music similar to Bach's style. Laurie sees using algorithms as a natural way to make music, helping her focus on the creative parts she can't turn into rules.

Many of Laurie's other songs, even those not strictly "algorithmic," still use rule-like ideas. She felt that writing these rules as computer code was just a natural step for her music.

Music Mouse: An Intelligent Instrument

Laurie Spiegel's most famous and widely used software is Music Mouse, which she created in 1986. She called it an "intelligent instrument" because it helped people create music easily on Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari computers. She used Music Mouse to compose several of her own works, like "Cavis muris" and "Three Sonic Spaces." She kept updating the program for many years, and it is still available for people to try out from her website.

Beyond Music: Art and Film

Besides electronic and computer music, Laurie Spiegel has also composed pieces for piano, guitar, and small orchestras. She is also an artist who creates drawings, photographs, and video art. At Bell Labs, she wrote one of the first computer programs for drawing or painting. She later added interactive video and sound to it in the mid-1970s.

Laurie also worked as a video artist and composed music for TV shows and films. She created special sound effects for the science fiction film The Lathe of Heaven. She enjoyed making soundtracks because she felt that "all that really matters is emotional content" in film music.

In the 1980s, she focused on developing music software and teaching at places like Cooper Union and New York University. She received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2018 for her work. In 2023, she received a major award for electronic music from the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for her entire career. She has also been working to save and organize all of her musical works digitally.

Her Unique Style

Philip Sherburne from Pitchfork described Laurie Spiegel's music. He said she uses a programmer's careful eye to create both long, flowing sounds (called drones) and folk-inspired counterpoints in a very simple way.

Helping Animals and Making Music Accessible

Laurie Spiegel is a strong supporter of animal rights. Throughout her career, she has tried to help people understand and care for animals that are often overlooked in cities, like mice, rats, and pigeons. She learned to care for pigeons in college and started helping injured birds in New York City after the September 11 attacks. Since 2004, she has regularly fed local pigeons in Manhattan's Duane Park to make sure they get good food.

To raise awareness for animals, Laurie has created several artworks about urban wildlife. One important work is Ferals (2006), an audio-visual art piece with over 3,000 photos of New York City pigeons. It also included pigeon sounds that told the story of young pigeons asking their parents for food. Other works about animal rights include Anon a Mouse (2003), a short "opera" with a human, a dog, and a mouse, and Cavis Muris (1986), which was inspired by the mice in her warehouse.

Laurie is also passionate about making music available to everyone. She believes that computer music tools, like her Music Mouse software, can make it easier and cheaper for people to create music. She feels these tools have already helped more people, including women composers, get involved in the music industry.

Music Albums

• The Expanding Universe, 1980. This album was re-released in 2012 with extra songs.
• 60x60 (2006-2007), released 2008. A collection of 60-second songs from the 60x60 project.
• Ooppera, 2002. Laurie contributed to this album of short operas by different artists.
• Harmonices Mundi (1977, released 2004). This music is Laurie's interpretation of Kepler's ideas about how planets move.
• The P-ART Project - 12 Portraits, 2001. A collection by 12 composers, including Laurie's "Conversational Paws."
• Obsolete Systems, 1991. This album looks back at Laurie's music from the 1970s and 80s, played on older electronic instruments.
• Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 2000. A 3-CD collection featuring Laurie's 1974 song Appalachian Grove.
• Miniatures 2 - a sequence of sixty tiny masterpieces, 2000. A collection of 60 artists' music for a video called A Volume of Julia Sets.
• Female of the Species, a 2-CD collection of experimental music by women composers.
• Enhanced Gravity, 1999. Laurie contributed to this album of music and multimedia by ten artists.
• Cocks Crow, Dogs Bark: New Compositional Intentions, 1998. A CD that came with a music journal, featuring The Unquestioned Answer.
• Women in Electronic Music - 1977, 1977, re-released 1998. A collection of electronic music by women.
• Computer Music Journal Sound Anthology, 1996. A CD that came with the 20th Anniversary issue of Computer Music Journal.
• Unseen Worlds, 1991, re-released 1994 and 2019. This album features only Laurie Spiegel's works.
• The Virtuoso in the Computer Age - III, 1993. A collection of four electronic artists, including Laurie's Cavis Muris (1986).
• Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, 1992. Music from the "Sounds of Earth" record sent on the Voyager spacecraft, which includes a part of Harmonices Mundi.
• New American Music Vol. 2. An old LP record that is no longer printed.
• The Expanding Universe, 1980. Contains 4 songs made using the GROOVE system at Bell Labs. Re-released with more songs in 2012.
• Music for New Electronic Media, 1977. Early works by several electronic composers.

See also

In Spanish: Laurie Spiegel para niños