Laurie Spiegel (born 1945)
Laurie Spiegel is one of several women profiled in the 2020 documentary Sisters with Transistors who sidestepped the prejudice against women composers by becoming early explorers in electronic music.
She was born in Chicago and is largely self-taught in music. She attended Shimer College (which implements a Great Books program) and as part of a study-abroad program, spent two years at Oxford. She earned a Social Sciences degree from Shimer but studied some music theory and composition while abroad.
Laurie Spiegel worked with several electronic music systems over the years, including at Bell Laboratories. She tends towards an algorithmic and interactive approach to music. In 1986 she created the music composition software Music Mouse for the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari computers. It was most recently updated for Mac OS 9 and remains available.
Part of Laurie Spiegel’s 1972 composition Sediment was used in 2001 for the soundtrack of the movie The Hunger Games. Here’s the whole composition from the album An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Vol. 4:
About 2½ hours of Laurie Spiegel’s music is available on the two-CD compilation The Expanding Universe and another hour on Unseen Worlds. Both albums are available on Spotify and some tracks are available on YouTube. Here’s a 1975 composition called Drums from The Expanding Universe collection:
Laurie Spiegel’s composition Harmonices Mundi (also called Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds) is a realization of Kepler’s 1619 book of the same name in which he described astronomical phenomenon in geometric forms:
An except was chosen to begin the “Sounds of the Earth” section on the Golden Record that accompanied the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft into space.