There’s a rather good interview here with Laurie Spiegel, one of my sources of inspiration. She’s a composer, musician, and programmer who started way back before computers were fast enough to generate audio signals in real time. In the interview, she touches on a number of interesting topics, including what it was like to be at Bell Labs in its heyday, how computer programming has become considerably more difficult over the last several decades, and how making music with software usually involves a layer of detachment not present when making music with instruments. It’s a good read if you have any interest at all in the history of the use of computers in music, as told by someone who had a not insubstantial influence on how this history came about.
I’m also gonna lapse into otaku mode here and mention that I spoke to Ms. Spiegel on the phone, some 20-odd years ago. I had purchased her Music Mouse software and had some sort of question about it. (This was long before the internet, mind you, so you actually picked up the phone if you needed help with software.) I was a little surprised to figure out that I was speaking to the author herself; it was perhaps my first brush with fame in the tiny world of music software–a world which I ended up immersed in, obviously. I don’t remember what my question was, but I remember that she was gracious and enthusiastic.
