Eventide has released an updated version of Music Mouse, the groundbreaking 1986 computer instrument created by composer and technologist Laurie Spiegel, rebuilt for modern Mac and Windows systems without altering what made it so special in the first place.
Before anyone was talking about making music with computers, Laurie Spiegel was already doing it. Back in 1986, the composer and software designer created Music Mouse – a program that transformed an ordinary computer mouse into a fully playable musical instrument, capable of generating chords, melodies and arpeggios with nothing more than a flick of the wrist. It ran on Atari, Amiga and early Mac computers, and marked the beginning of an new era of digitial music creation.
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Decades later, Eventide has brought it back with a fresh upgrade. The new version of Music Mouse keeps everything that made Spiegel’s original so compelling, updated for Mac 10.14 and above, including Apple Silicon, and Windows 11. Mouse position still determines what the instrument generates, just as it always did, but now it can run directly inside a DAW, sync to an external MIDI clock, and lock to hardware or notation software.
Other updates include expanded sound presets drawn from Spiegel’s original DX7 and TX7 patches, clearer visual feedback around the Polyphonic Cursor, optional UI guides and a hint bar, a scalable interface, and left- or right-handed layout options.
Eventide’s Tony Agnello, who led the project, puts it well: “When Laurie first described Music Mouse to me, I realised how it stood apart. The emerging tech of the mid ‘80s was focused on adding effects or creating new sounds. Laurie’s idea was neither; it was different. She imagined using the computer as an intelligent musical tool that could be ‘trained’ to accompany and enrich a musician’s performance. She was light years ahead of her time,” reflects Tony Agnello, First Engineer at Eventide.
Spiegel herself described Music Mouse as an improvising instrument and a brainstorming instrument – one that encourages thinking at the level of phrase and gesture rather than individual notes. For anyone who’s ever wanted a more intuitive, less prescriptive way into music-making, that description still holds.
Angelo states, “A new generation of Music Mouse is long overdue, and it’s my honour to have helped breathe new life into Laurie’s creation.“
Music Mouse is available now from Eventide. Full details here.
