Laurie Spiegel
pioneer of electronic music
Laurie Spiegel (born September 20, 1945) is an American composer. She grew up playing guitar and lute. As a music student and fledgling composer in New York at the end of the 60s, Spiegel fell in love with analog synthesizers at first sight, or rather, first sound. In 1973, she starts working at Bell Labs, learning to program that era’s giant computers. One of Spiegel’s composition is the opening cut on the Golden Record, a disc that accompanied both Voyager probes on their journey across the solar system and out into the great interstellar beyond in 1977. In 1985 she buys herself a Mac 512k and immediately wants to push sounds around with the mouse. She develops Music Mouse, a groundbreaking computer program that turns the Mac itself into a musical instrument, combining programming and composing into a single process. Music Mouse quickly turns into an in-demand application, among the earliest Music Software available to consumers.