1986, meet 2026. Music Mouse by Laurie Spiegel is available now as a new Eventide application — completely faithful to the original, ground-breaking compositional application, but fully modernized.
I love the snippet they chose from her 80s interview. In a weird way, for all the tech and AI, a lot of it is just about automating what’s already been done. Here is the opposite: the realization that most music is yet to be made — it’s not in any training set because it doesn’t exist yet.
I am just firing this up but at the risk of making CDM into Create Digital Mice, I mean, we have to keep the Music Mouse story going. I’m impressed: the full layout and character of the original are completely reproduced here, but with all modernized details and some new features (not to mention a high definition interpretation of the UI).
New/improved/returning:
- New OS support: macOS 10.14 (Intel and Apple Silicon); Windows 11+ PCs
- Additional visual feedback: indications of keyboard presses, a hint bar, and active note display on the border keyboards
- Visual separators around the cursor (optional)
- Left- and right-handed layout support (yes!)
- Resizable UI
- New Laurie Spiegel parameter presets and 30+ synth presets “drawn from her original DX7 and TX7 patches” (meaning you effectively get the benefits of her original Yamaha outboard gear!)
- Polyphonic Cursor and up to 4-note polyphony (now with some refined color feedback)
- Chord, Arpeggio, Line, Improv modes; 10 pattern sequences
- 6 Harmonic Modes: Chromatic, Octatonic, Middle Eastern, Diatonic, Pentatonic, Quartal (12-TET internally, but you could retune outboard gear, of course, even if this is very western keyboard-oriented by design)
- Printable keyboard map
And as before, you just playfully toy around with pitch using keyboard shortcuts and the mouse.
It’s about time for leftie accessibility!
Beautiful demo here with Eventide’s Temperance:
But the internal synth patches sound wonderful, 80s Spiegel chic but entirely at home in 2026:
Keyboard and mouse gestures make this at home with other software — and perhaps your new ideal controller for when you don’t have space around. (Yes, yes, I do use laptops in buses, planes, and bed.)
It’s wonderful to see the MIDI keyboard and mouse in a new way. For all the evergreen calls to “stop using the computer” as an instrument — even in 2026, when no one actually reads emails any more, people still call it “checking your emails.” And yet this suddenly makes the mouse and keyboard look elegant and musical.
Apparently, if you use the code MOUSEY, for a limited time, it looks like you can get it for $19. (No affiliate link here, just spotted that in their newsletter! Say CDM sent ‘ya…)
An important note, as people seem not to expect this: Music Mouse is a standalone application. It’s not a plug-in. You can route MIDI between applications or out to hardware — or use the internal synth. (MIDI between applications is a built-in capability on macOS; on Windows, check the tools over at nerds.de.)
https://www.eventideaudio.com/software/music-mouse/
Terrence O’Brien has done a full interview with Laurie for The Verge:
Laurie Spiegel on the difference between algorithmic music and ‘AI’
Here’s a look at the internal presets — they’re very retro-80s, yes. (But with MIDI out, Music Mouse can sound like whatever you want it to sound like!)
And MIDI routing — again, not a plug-in, folks!
I have a feeling we will soon be inundated with Music Mouse videos, and I am there for it. You can check out some action on Amiga in the earlier story:
The icon, Eventide, is everything.
