atraylor – Looking Outward 11 – Section B

For this post I chose a piece by Laurie Spiegel from her 1970-80s album The Expanding Universe called “East River Dawn.” I’m inspired by this piece because it sounds complex and coherent. I don’t know much about music arrangement, but her work sounds well composed. The Expanding Universe was made in the 70s while Spiegel worked at Bell Laboratories. She used synthesizers and other prototype generation systems. Her reasoning behind using computers for music is that they are an artistic means rather than an end. In addition to being a trailblazer in computer music, her work was included on the Voyager spacecraft’s “Sounds of Earth” section of it’s gold record.