Throughout her long and distinguished career, Laurie Spiegel’s extraordinary range of work as composer, performer, software designer, visual and video artist, and theorist has been marked by a unique combination of innovation and humanism. A pioneer in algorithmic music composition, Spiegel’s career straddles successive eras in the digital arts.
In the 1970s, she worked as composer and software engineer alongside fellow computer music pioneer Max Mathews, countering criticism about »dehumanizing the arts« by creating affecting, humanistic music with »GROOVE«, the legendary real-time minicomputer performance system created by Mathews and F. Richard Moore. Spiegel also wrote one of the first drawing/painting programs at Bell Labs, to which she later added interactive video and synchronous audio output capability.
Other important works from this period include her composition »Appalachian Grove I« from the album »New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women in Electronic Music« (1977). Among her most important recordings are »Obsolete Systems« (2001), »Unseen Worlds« (1991) and »The Expanding Universe« (1980/2012).
Spiegel's music, her writings on computer music interface design, and her early advocacy for the centered place of women in music technology include the technical, the social, the aesthetic, and the human in equal measure. Her early understanding of the computer as a new kind of folk instrument has now come to pass, and her own influential foray into this area was the celebrated program »Music Mouse« (1986), now regarded as one of the first »intelligent instruments«.
Automating some aspects of the performance process allowed the program to transform »users« into performers, composers, collaborators and co-creators. Spiegel also designed the »alphaSyntauri« music system for the Apple II microcomputer, and founded New York University’s Computer Music Center.
Spiegel's realization of Johannes Kepler's »Harmonices Mundi« was chosen by astronomer Carl Sagan as the opening track of the Golden Record placed onboard NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which was launched in 1977. In 2018 this work, along with the music of Chuck Berry, Beethoven, Senegalese percussion and Javanese gamelan, became one of the first and only human-made musical compositions to enter interstellar space.
It is in the light of all these accomplishments and many more that the jury is delighted to award the Giga-Hertz main award for lifetime achievement to Laurie Spiegel.
George Lewis, Juror