Composer Laurie Spiegel's music draws on her classical training, pre-classical lute and folk banjo roots, but she is also a computer programmer, software designer and visual and video artist and often-published theorist. She is known worldwide for her pioneering work with several early electronic and computer music systems. Her focus with them has been largely on interactive software that use algorithmic logic as a supplement to human abilities, and on the aesthetics of musical structure and cognitive process. Her best known work includes her seventies music from the GROOVE Hybrid System at Bell Labs, early work in the online transmission of digital music, a realization of Kepler's Harmony of the World that went up on the Voyager spacecraft's golden record, and Music Mouse – An Intelligent Instrument for Mac, Amiga and Atari computers. Although she is often grouped with the Minimalists due to the modal, drone and rhythmic aspects of her early LP The Expanding Universe, her recent music is often considerably darker and more complex, as her later CDs Unseen Worlds and Obsolete Systems show. She lives and works in Lower Manhattan since the seventies, and has taught at Cooper Union and NYU, where she founded the computer music studio in 1981.