Eventide Music Mouse revives Laurie Spiegel’s Intelligent Musical Instrument - February 17, 2026

Eventide Music Mouse revives the innovative mouse-based computer music instrument from electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel.

In today’s world, we have smart plugins like Scaler 3 or built-in features in hardware or software for working with scales, chords, and melodies. Even in the past, attempts were made to find new ways to create music in a clever, modern way.

Already in 1986, electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel developed the Music Mouse software, “an intelligent instrument” for Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari computers, that automates the process of chords and scales. 40 years after this innovation, Eventide is bringing the Music Mouse back to modern systems.



Eventide Music Mouse
The concept of the Music Mouse or the “Intelligent Music Instrument” is simple. It turns simple mouse movements into real-time melody and counterpoint, letting you play music directly instead of programming it.

Eventide has kept the basic structure of the Musical Mouse app the same as in 1986. No plugin, but a standalone app designed to be unobtrusive. It launches instantly, stays focused, and responds with the speed and feel of a real instrument.

It has up to 4 color-coded voices (red, green, blue, violet) sorted in horizontal and vertical sections. Independent horizontal and vertical motion generate interlocking musical lines, while built-in harmonic logic keeps everything musically coherent.



Like the original, it’s designed to improvise, explore new ideas, or even drive external instruments.

Music Mouse is a standalone instrument with built-in sounds (parameter presets and 30+ synth presets from the DX7 and TX7). Alternatively, you can use it with external instruments with MIDI clock sync.

With simple keyboard presses, you can perform musical gestures, and you can push notes around using the computer mouse.

Music Mouse 2026
It’s not just a 1:1 replica of Laurie Spiegel’s original software. It’s also been brought into the year 2026 with new features and improvements.

The visual feedback around the “Polyphonic Cursor” has been made clearer, so you can better see what your mouse movements are doing. There are also options for left- or right-handed operation.

Then, the interface now also provides hints to better understand the parameters, and everything can be scaled cleanly. The latter includes six harmonix modes: chromatic, octatonic, middle eastern, diatonic, pentatonic, and quartal.

Eventide increased the polyphony in the Music Mouse to 4, allowing you to play 4 notes simultaneously. Further, you can play with 10 built-in pattern sequences as well as explore four rhythmic treatments: chord, arpeggio, line, and improv.F

First Impression
The music production world is flooded with software and plugins every day. Software like this certainly stands out from the crowd, as it has a history in computer music.

It showed early on where music production was headed. For me, it’s a very welcome comeback for a software that’s still refreshingly different today.

Eventide Music Mouse is available now for an introductory price of $19 instead of $29 with code MOUSEY until the end of April 2026.

It runs as a standalone application on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows. It requires a free iLok software account for registration.

More information here: Eventide

Source: https://synthanatomy.com/2026/02/ev...-spiegels-intelligent-musical-instrument.html

 

I prefer analogue.

 

There's a good (but apparently not perfect) browser emulation of Music Mouse at https://teropa.info/musicmouse/

A fun toy or maybe more, as I'm not entirely sure I'm getting it right. It does MIDI output so you can record your twiddlings to your favourite sequencer.

 

Amazing!!! great news....Laurie Spiegel was ahead of her time

 

Tried the demo. Love it. It is stunning how automatically you begin to discover combinations of things that you like. Feels like cheating.