Laurie Spiegel (Chicago, September 20, 1945)
10 years Laurie started playing guitar, mandolin and Benjo deepening his studies privately in London. After graduating in social sciences at Oxford Univesity she took courses in composition and Renaissance and Baroque lute at Julliard School under the direction of Jacob Druckman and Vincent Perischetti. At 20 he began writing the first compositions.
In 1969, Subotnick visiting the studio in Manhattan, for the first time a Buchla 100, the same as Morton had used in 1967 to record "Silver Apples of the Moon." It's love at first sight:
"An instrument (Buchla 100) That is not limited to all kinds of notes But Makes sounds amazing, and I can play it myself INSTEAD OF HAVING to write down lots of little notes that i can not hear Hoping someday people will play Them. "
After this meeting the world Laurie changed forever: everything was different, even the traffic noise in New York had become a revelation. The Buchla was a tool made to work with the very nature of sound.
From 1973 to 1979 he worked at Bell Labs, learning how to program computers to create music and images. In the late '70s Jef Rakini gives her the prototype of the Apple II 48k. Thanks to this, Laurie became active in the counterculture scene of the technological will be one of the first composers to use the computer as a creative medium. In those years no one thought computers suitable for the production musical instruments were dehumanizing, anti-intuitive, no emotion. They were used by the government, banks and a few powerful businessmen. Laurie instead to the new technology could become part of folk music, had enormous potential within a pop. Spiegel soon would find a way for computers to make music available to everyone. Collaborate invention Synthauri Alpha, the first computer music system sold with an affordable price used for sound effects of the second Star Trek movie. Tired of the art scene that she had helped create in New York, in 1981 moved to Toronto where he directs the field of software development for McLeyvier. Mac 512k in 1985 with inventing the "Music Mouse" transmuting the Mac into a tool that allows people to "illiterate" to play in an intuitive way. Music Mouse becomes one of the first music software for sale in a position to allow musicians who have never studied music composition or to create tonal or atonal music by simply pressing buttons and moving the computer mouse.
"Women composers Were Still Few and Far between. Technology is largely Responsible for how much women composers are now more common, because it allowed women to get their music to the point where it could be heard (versus silent dots on paper), so the public and powers-that-be could learn that we also could do this. Women are still to some degree underdogs in composing. Throughout the 70s I earned much of my living by composing soundtracks for film and video. But jobs, or maybe people who would a woman as their composer, were few and far between. Even today, several decades later, the percentage of major motion pictures scored by women is still appallingly low.” Laurie Spiegel