Laurie Spiegel is an American computer music pioneer. She received a degree in the social sciences, taught herself music notation, studied classic guitar and composition privately in London, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman and Vincent Persichetti.^
She has worked with analog synthesizers since 1969 and got involved with digital computers to achieve greater compositional control. She wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973-79 and later founded New York University’s Computer Music Studio.
Spiegel learnt computer programming starting in 1973 at Bell Labs, Dept. of Acoustic and Behavioral Research. She started work with punch cards, 24-bit assembly language, FORTRAN IV and 1977 onwards got assigned work using the newly developed UNIX and C.
She composed computer generated images during 1974-1976 using a Rand Tablet and a FORTRAN IV software she wrote which was one of the first, at Bell Labs in 1974. She interfaced it with a time structuring software she was already using for music composition, and was able to generate output to video and film in the following years.
Some of her early Computer generated can be viewed here.
Texts by Laurie Spiegel.
