User:OblongSquare22/Laurie Spiegel

Alien Listening Book

Spiegel, Laurie. “[Artist’s Statement].” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 28, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 127–28. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hsi&AN=509897771&site=ehost-live.

This source illuminates the specific and unique sorts of algorithmic composition which interested Spiegel. She described how she implemented computer algorithms to simulate natural phenomena, tonal harmony rules of earlier musical eras, and large data sets (like genetic code). Unlike other artists of the time, who often used algorithms for their own sake, Spiegel's main goal remained musicality. She posits that many of her non-computerized compositions were based on definable rules, and thus, that defining these rules in computer code was simply a natural next step for her own musical self expression.

Benner, Steve. Review of Laurie Spiegel: Obsolete Systems. Computer Music Journal, vol. 26 no. 3, 2002, p. 97-99. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/7919.

For example, Spiegel's 1977 piece, Improvisation on a Concerto Generator, was generated from an algorithm designed to replicate Bach's "chorale-style harmonic progressions." Notably, Spiegel's compositions were constrained (and influenced) by the technology of the time. Her 1979 piece,Voices Within: A Requiem, used microtonality due to the new microtonal capabilities afforded to her by the Electrocomp 100 and Recordings 99 200 analog synthesizers. Her 1975 piece Drums, which features complex polyrhythmic elements, was made possible by the "rapidly switching electrical transients" of a state-of-the-art computer system at Bell Lab

Feisst, Sabine. "Animal Ecologies: Laurie Spiegel's Musical Explorations of Urban wildlife1." Social Alternatives 33.1 (2014): 16-22. ProQuest. 8 Nov. 2024 .

Spiegel was an animal rights activist, and her philosophical beliefs in this regard are reflected in some of her oeuvre. Specifically, she sought to raise awareness for "underprivileged and disparaged" animals within urban landscapes, such as mice, rats, and pigeons. Her piece Cavis Muris, for example, attempted to capture (what Spiegel imagined would be) the ontological experience of the mice living in her warehouse. The vibrato in the piece, achieved using digital LFOs, captured "the tentative small movements and tiny gestures of mice."

Bosse, Joanna. "Spiegel, Laurie." Grove Music Online. 2001. Oxford University Press. Date of access 8 Nov. 2024, <https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.ezproxy.princeton.edu/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000042733>

This source is helpful for improving the existing Wikipedia article's description of Spiegel's career and education.

Spiegel, Laurie. “Should Music-Making Be Reserved for an Elite?” Computer Music Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 1998, pp. 6–7. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3681038. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

This article, written by Spiegel herself, describes her commitment to democratizing music and reforming the elite Western model of music production that has proliferated over the past centuries. She describes how technological developments in computer music should play a part in this democratizing trend, and describes it as "one of the greatest gratifications of my own work."

https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/laurie-spiegel-grassroots-technologist/

In this interview, Spiegel describes the influence of early musical experiences on her musical practice, including her performance interest on mandolin and guitar. Furthermore, she describes how her interest in these folk instruments (and their accompanying improvisational practices) put her as an outsider in academic and elitist spaces like Juilliard. Of her experience there, she remarks that, "I was completely not expecting the dominance of the post-Webernite, serialist, atonal, blip and bleep school of music." Unlike the serious and intellectual environment there, she places herself in the musical tradition of the musical amateur (i.e. someone who plays music just for the love of it). Furthermore, she describes how her compositional style, although computerizes, is ultimately in the folk tradition. For her, the most important elements of music are emotion and structure, and her obsession with computerized music derives from the latter. She worked for three and a half years writing film soundtracks, and she remarks that, "when you do soundtracks, all that really matters is emotional content." Another interesting remark in this interview relates to her position as a a woman in the late 20th century music industry. She says, "Electronic instruments were a great democratizing force. That’s one of the reasons why you began to see so many more women composers because you could go from an idea for a piece to the point where you could actually play it for another human being."

Intereted in music and structure...her interests were "at odds with...the music that was in with the dominant power structures when I went to Juilliard." "It wasn't really considered cool to be interested in learning to write tonal music."

worked in shared studio spaces in the 70s...collaborate work ethic

against the culture of constantly processing new information rather than looking inwards..."There's just nothing like the imagination." "listening to your own silent inner ear"

But she fell in love with machines the first time she saw a mainframe tape-operated computer at Purdue University on a field trip there with her high school physics class and has been finding ways to humanize them in her own musical compositions and software development ever since. She sees a lot of common ground between the seemingly oppositional aesthetics of folk traditions and the digital realm. In fact, when we met up with her last month in her Lower Manhattan loft crammed full of computers, musical instruments, and toys of all sorts, she frequently spoke about how in her world view the computer is actually a folk instrument.

https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/laurie-spiegels-expanding-universe/

Another good interview. Here, it is described how Spiegel runs a bird rescue group and how she believes the technological revolution has endangered certain human ontologies. The age of information overload, she remarks, has stopped people from "being in touch with your own imagination. And your own internal rhythms." These sorts of practices, to her, are crucial to art-marking. She also describes the strange experience of coming into fame in her mid-70s. She was an innovator in electronic music in the 70s, and she even had her "haunting interpretation of Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds" sent into space on the golden record. However, she has only recently gained widespread recognition when one of her pieces was used in the Hunger Games soundtrack. She remarks, "that since computers no longer need her to fight for their assimilation as 'real' instruments, she’s been liberated to return to her roots as an improviser, composer and guitar player. To what really drew her to music in the first place."

https://www.tribecatrib.com/content/proud-and-fond-flock-she-takes-tribeca-pigeons-under-her-wing

Another source about Spiegel's commitment to urban wildlife. She feeds pigeons almost daily in Tribeca's Duane Park, and she describes how she began taking in birds and caring for them in the aftermath of 9/11.

Article Draft

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 Harmonices 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's 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 taught herself Western music notation at the age of 20, 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. ** Of her experience at the Juilliard school, Spiegel has remarked that, "I was completely not expecting the dominance of the post-Webernite, serialist, atonal, blip and bleep school of music." In contrast to this dominant atonal paradigm of the time, Spiegel placed herself as an outsider, claiming to instead carry on the folk tradition. **

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).^{[clarification needed] **} While many other electronic musicians of the time viewed algorithmic music as an intellectual exercise, Spiegel created algorithms to simulate natural phenomena, emulate tonal harmony rules of earlier musical eras, and sonify large data sets (like genetic code). For example, Spiegel's 1977 piece, Improvisation on a Concerto Generator, was generated from an algorithm designed to replicate Bach's "chorale-style harmonic progressions." Many of Spiegel's non-algorithmic compositions also use algorithm-like rules, and the artist has claimed that defining these rules in computer code was simply a natural next step for her own musical self expression. **

Spiegel's best known and most widely used software was Music Mouse (1986), a self-described "intelligent instrument" 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. She continued to update the program through Macintosh OS 9, and as of 2012,^{[needs update]} it remained available for purchase or demo download from her Web site.

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. ** Spiegel has remarked that the most important elements of music to her are "emotion and structure," the former of which she was able to focus on through this soundtrack work. "When you do soundtracks," she claims, "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. For her work she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2018).^{[citation needed]}

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 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.

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 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 has created several pieces in the vain, such as her piece Cavis Muris which attempts to capture the ontological experience of the mice living in her warehouse. The vibrato in the piece, achieved using digital LFOs, captured "the tentative small movements and tiny gestures of mice. Spiegel began caring for urban wildlife who had been injured in the aftermath of 9/11, and she continues to feed pigeons almost daily in Tribeca's Duane Park. **

** Spiegel is also committed to democratizing the means and tools of musical production. She has describes how technological developments in computer music, many of which she started, have worked to reform the elite Western model of music production which has proliferated over the past centuries.She has describes this as "one of the greatest gratifications of my own work." **