“I want to put as many aspects of myself into music as I can, as much as possible of being alive, intensely conscious on all levels,” wrote American composer Laurie Spiegel in 1980 in the liner notes to her album The Expanding Universe.
With this attitude, studying composition at the Juilliard School in New York City from 1969 to 1972 was not fulfilling for her. Spiegel found the serialist, atonal contemporary music that dominated conservatory pedagogy at the time to be heavy, sad and introspective.
Instead, she sought connections between things that are not obviously related, such as classical, folk and ethnic music – or scientific and artistic methods and tools.
This was precisely the approach taken at Bell Labs in New Jersey, just outside New York. When Telstar, the first civilian communications satellite developed there, was launched into space in 1962, Michael Noll was developing the first computer art in another department. And a year before Bell invented the laser in 1958, Max Mathews was already generating digital sounds there with his computer programme MUSIC.
In the late 1960s, Mathews developed a computer system for controlling synthesizers. It was called GROOVE, which stood for Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment, and it allowed improvisations to be recorded in such a way that they could be edited with complete freedom.
Mathews enabled Spiegel to have access to this system in 1973. And while other composers continued to record their work with synthesizers on tape and then laboriously edit it afterwards, Spiegel controlled a computer with a keyboard, joystick, drawing tablet and pushbuttons.
The computer was the size of a room and was located opposite Spiegel behind a glass pane. It translated her movements and thus controlled the sound production of a synthesiser that was housed elsewhere on the floor.
The composer heard these sounds while on her controllers, altered them in real time and thus experimented with her concept of Slow Change Music. Until 1977, Spiegel created an early form of ambient music at Bell Labs, although the term did not yet exist. For Spiegel, it was simply a type of listening music that she could relate to.
Listen to the track The Unquestioned Answer from Laurie Spiegel’s album The Expanding Universe in Sounds Central’s mix Quiet Ambient – In Lilac Heaths
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