Gear Club Podcast

In 1973 Laurie Spiegel walked into Bell Labs and into a room where someone was steering lasers through mirrors with audio signals. She stayed six years.

Part two picks up where part one left off. Laurie talks with Eventide's Tony Agnello and James Frazee about GROOVE, the computer controlled analog system she used to interact with music in real time while everyone else was waiting until Monday for thirty seconds of audio. She describes porting it to video and inventing a system she called VAMPIRE, which she could only run at night because Bela Julesz needed the video recorder during the day. Max Mathews told her real time video was impossible. Then he walked in and watched it work.

She also covers her residency at the WNET Experimental Television Lab, the audio effects she built for their production of The Lathe of Heaven in a cutting room directly across the street from Eventide, and what it was like being a film music editor at a time when every feature film composer in America was a man.

Then the personal computer arrives. The alphaSyntauri, Timothy Leary at a computer arts conference in Philadelphia, bare motherboards playing dueling banjos, and sending audio to Los Angeles over a 300 baud modem (which took an entire day).

The conversation brings us to where she is now, which is writing for human beings again after a lifetime of writing for machines. The Ahn Trio and the guitar quartet Dither are both recording her work.

ABOUT LAURIE SPIEGEL A pioneer of computer music and algorithmic composition. Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2019. Worked at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1979 on the GROOVE system, one of the first computer systems built for making music in real time. Her realization of Kepler's Harmonice Mundi opens the Sounds of Earth section of the Voyager Golden Record, currently in interstellar space. Her 1986 software instrument Music Mouse put algorithmic composition in the hands of people with no formal training, and was re-released by Eventide in 2026. Her 1972 piece "Sediment" appears in The Hunger Games.

Laurie Spiegel taught herself notation in an off-grid trailer in western Illinois, with no running water and a kerosene lamp, because she wanted to write down what she was making up on the guitar. A few years later she was at Bell Labs with Max Mathews and Ken Thompson, writing software that let a computer improvise alongside her.

Somewhere in between, a forwarded phone call reached her in a backyard in Woodstock, asking to send her work out of the solar system. She assumed it was a crank call and asked them to put it in writing (on NASA letterhead).

This is part one of two, in which Laurie talks with Eventide's Tony Agnello and James Frazee about a childhood on the South Side of Chicago, the factory reject Harmony guitar she bought with recycling money, and the three library albums that redirected her life. She explains what actually went on the Voyager Golden Record, a realization of Kepler's Harmonice Mundi, and why she asked NASA to prove they were real. She walks through Juilliard, where the composition jury refused to accept anything she made electronically, and Bell Labs, where nobody told anyone what to work on.

She also makes the case she has been making for fifty years: that electronic music is folk music. Made at home, on homemade instruments, passed sideways from person to person and changed along the way.

Finally, she shares the story of Music Mouse, her 1986 software instrument, brought back this year by Eventide.

ABOUT LAURIE SPIEGEL A pioneer of computer music and algorithmic composition. Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2019. Worked at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1979 on the GROOVE system, one of the first computer systems built for making music in real time. Her realization of Kepler's Harmonice Mundi opens the Sounds of Earth section of the Voyager Golden Record, currently in interstellar space. Her 1986 software instrument Music Mouse put algorithmic composition in the hands of people with no formal training, and was re-released by Eventide in 2026. Her 1972 piece "Sediment" appears in The Hunger Games.

John Agnello and Stewart Lerman kick off a new Record of the Week with The War on Drugs' Red Eyes, off 2014's Lost in the Dream. They trace the two-year process behind the track (six or seven studios, by their own count), break down the harmonic choices that give it its pull, and swap stories about how they each got hooked on Adam Granduciel's band in the first place.

Elvis Costello sits down with Gear Club for a career-spanning conversation, from the tiny London room where My Aim Is True was recorded to the unpublished Bob Dylan lyrics he helped finish decades later. John Agnello and special guest host Tony Agnello of Eventide join for a conversation that gets surprisingly candid about the studios, the producers, and the gear behind four decades of records, including the Eventide H910 Harmonizer that helped define the guitar sound on This Year's Model. Topics include the 49th anniversary box set of My Aim Is True, the making of Imperial Bedroom, working with Jeff Emerick, King of America with T-Bone Burnett, Wise Up Ghost with Questlove and The Roots, and the New Basement Tapes sessions built from Bob Dylan's unfinished lyrics.

This week, we take a look at the acclaimed Surf's Up by The Beach Boys. In 2004, the album was included in Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" and ranked 61 on Pitchfork Media's "The Top 100 Albums Of The 1970s".