Laurie Spiegel (born September 20, 1945) is an American composer and software engineer. She has worked at Bell Labs and 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 the "Sounds of Earth" section of the Voyager Golden Record. Her 1972 piece "Sediment" was included in the 2012 film The Hunger Games. In 2019, she was 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 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, 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. Spiegel felt like an outsider at Juilliard, perceiving her interests to be at odds with "the post-Webernite, serialist, atonal, blip and bleep school of music" which was then dominant in academia. She forged connections outside of Juilliard by working in shared studio spaces around New York, such as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, to which her composition teacher had granted her access. 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). In various pieces, Spiegel has used musical algorithms to simulate natural phenomena, emulate tonal harmony rules, and sonically represent large data sets. In her piece Viroid, she used the genetic code of a simple organism to determine the pitches produced by a synthesizer. 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 in order to "focus more completely on the aspects of music that I cannot reduce to logic." Spiegel's best known and most widely-used software is the interactive MIDI sequencer Music Mouse, an "intelligent instrument" controlled by a computer mouse and keyboard that was first released in 1986 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. In 2026, Spiegel rereleased Music Mouse for contemporary operating systems in partnership with Eventide, Inc. 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, writings, and computer software. 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 in New York in 1976. She composed series music for the TV Lab's weekly "VTR—Video and Television Review" and sound effects for its film The Lathe of Heaven, both under the direction of David Loxton. In addition to computer software development, Spiegel supported herself through by both teaching and soundtrack composition starting in the early 1970s. She had steady work throughout the decade at Spectra Films, Valkhn Films, WNET, and subsequently for various individual video artists, animators, and filmmakers. Spiegel enjoyed her brief work as a soundtrack composer, stating: "When you do soundtracks, all that really matters is emotional content." 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. She received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in 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 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."
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