In 1986, electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel created Music Mouse, a way for those with a Mac, Atari, or Amiga computer to dabble in algorithmic music creation. Music Mouse is deceptively simple: Notes are arranged on an XY grid, and you play it by moving a mouse around. Back in 1986, the computer mouse was still a relatively novel device. While it can trace its origins back to the late ’60s, it wasn’t until the Macintosh 128K in 1984 that it started seeing widespread adoption.
By then Spiegel, was already an accomplished composer. Her 1980 album The Expanding Universe is generally considered among the greatest ambient records of all time. And her composition “Harmony of the Worlds” is currently tearing through interstellar space as part of the Voyager Golden Record, launched in 1977. But she is also a technical wizard who joined Bell Labs in 1973 and was instrumental in early digital synthesis experiments and worked on an early computer graphics system called Vampire.
Spiegel was deeply drawn to algorithmic music composition and this new tool, the home computer. So, she created what she calls an “intelligent instrument” that enables the creation of complex melodies and harmonies with minimal music-theory knowledge. Music Mouse restricts you to particular scales, and then you explore them simply by pushing a mouse around.
Spiegel gives the user some control, of course. You can choose if notes move in parallel or contrary to each other, there are options to play notes back as chords or arpeggios, and there is even a simple pattern generator.
Despite being available for purchase until 2021, Spiegel never updated it to work on anything more current than Mac OS 9. Now, 40 years after its debut, it’s getting reborn for modern machines with help from Eventide.
Music Mouse is finally running on modern hardware. Image: Eventide
While it would have been easy for Eventide and Spiegel to overload the 2026 version of Music Mouse with countless modern amenities and new features, they kept things restrained for version 1.0. The core feature set is the same, though the sound engine is more robust and includes patches based on Spiegel’s own Yamaha DX7. There are also some enhanced MIDI features, including the ability to feed data from Music Mouse into your DAW or an external synthesizer.
Laurie Spiegel answered some questions for us about the history of Music Mouse, algorithmic composition, AI, and why she thinks the computer is a “folk instrument.”
What were the origins of Music Mouse? Was there something specific that inspired its creation?
When the first Macs came out, the use of a mouse as an input device, as an XY controller, was altogether new. Previous computers had just alphanumeric keyboard input or maybe custom controllers. The most obvious thing I immediately wanted to do was to be able to push sound around with that mouse. So, as soon as the first C compilers came out, I coded up a way to do that. Pretty soon, though, I wanted the sound quantized into scales, then to add more voices to fill out the harmony. Then I wanted to have controls for timbre, tempo, and everything else I eventually added.
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