Laurie Spiegel

Laurie Spiegel’s Concerto for Self-Accompanying Digital Synthesizer.

The instrument is possibly the first realtime digital synthesizer, built at Bell Telephone Labs, NJ by Hal Alles and team, with C language software written by Laurie that processes the player’s live input into an ongoing accompaniment that will continue to be played live against.

via MusicMouse

There’s an interesting interview with electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel over at Tokafi. 

In it, she discusses her initial experience working with classic modular synthesizers:

The first time I saw a synth (side note – we didn’t like that word then because of “synthetic” implying false or artificial instead of real music made on real instruments), the first time I saw one, a Buchla modular in Mort Subotnick’s old studio over the Bleeker Street Cinema, it was a mind blow and I fell madly in love with it.

After starting to work with it I began hearing everything differently, music, traffic noise… It was a revelation. Of course that was unlike most of today’s “synths”, not being based on a keyboard model or such concepts as notes. That was an instrument meant for working with the nature of sound itself. When I tried to communicate my excitement to others usually it fell flat.

Spiegel goes on to comment on the emotional relationship that she developed with old-school synths:

It’s not just that those are physical instruments that you have a long history of physical contact with and that live with you in your home and are part of your emotional life, like a guitar or a fine old violin whose every scratch mark and wear pattern and physical sensation you know.

It’s that in the early days each electronic instrument was a unique custom system that you participated in designing or configuring. Or if not, as with the early more mass produced instruments I have such as the alphaSyntauri or McLeyvier, they are heavily customized and personalized, and by modern standards few were made and far fewer still survive.