Eventide Music Mouse

A typical playing scenario in Music Mouse, using its built in sound generator. The four brightly coloured lines tally up with four MIDI pitches. All aspects of harmony, voicing, articulation and more are set to the left, and can be controlled in real time. The various bitmap graphics and the tips from ‘LS’ that appear at lower left are a nice, cute touch.

Can a piece of music software that’s almost as old as this magazine still inspire in 2026?

Only fellow ‘mature’ types like me will remember the particular thrill that was encountering and using a computer with a mouse for the first time, probably some time around the mid‑1980s, when all you’d known up to that point was Acorns, Sinclairs and Commodores with chunky command line interfaces and tape cassette storage. That really was a pivotal moment for personal computers, seeing the introduction of mice alongside the first widely available graphical operating systems. (Actually, the history of the mouse and graphical/object‑based interfaces stretches surprisingly further back, but only to experimental or mega‑money business‑oriented machines. Sorry, I digress...)

It was into this brave new world of convention‑busting computing concepts that Music Mouse was originally released, in January 1986. It was written by Laurie Spiegel, who’d spent much of the 1970s at Bell Labs, developing algorithmic and logic‑based musical performance systems. (Also there, incidentally, was Max Mathews, who went on to be one of the founders of IRCAM in Paris and had the ‘Max’ bit of Max/MSP named after him. And if you don’t know Laurie Spiegel’s album The Expanding Universe, which used the computer‑controlled modular synth she and Mathews had worked on, you should: a track from it is on the ‘golden record’ of the Voyager spacecraft. More digression...)

Anyway, to get to the point, Music Mouse ran on the first Apple Macintosh computers, and was later available (for a time at least) for the more affordable Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. It was in fact maintained for some years afterwards by Laurie Spiegel, and now it’s back for today’s computers running macOS 10.14 (or later) and Windows 11 (or later), developed in collaboration with Eventide. The fundamental concepts and mode of operation haven’t changed, so what is it about this 40‑year‑old software that warrants bringing it back to life?

Mouse House

A preferences panel gives options for setting up Music Mouse with external audio and MIDI hardware (here it’s playing my Nord piano) and incoming MIDI Clock. For DAW use though, no special configuration is required. Sadly that MIDI ‘source’ field chooses an external clock source only: it’s not possible to attach any real‑time controllers.

Essentially, Music Mouse is a pointer‑driven MIDI note generator. Move your mouse over its unusual chequerboard of musical pitches and it’ll spit out anything between one and four notes. It runs only as a standalone application, not as a plug‑in: it has a simple built‑in sound generator but it also acts as a virtual MIDI source for any instrument you like running in your DAW or other virtual instrument host. Or indeed you can use it to play a hardware synth connected via USB or DIN MIDI.

On the note grid, the X axis keyboard has pitches running low to high, left to right. Six octaves and a fourth, F to B flat. On the Y axis low notes are at the bottom and high notes higher up, with the same pitch range, but...