ABSTRACT
In 1947, when he was just twelve years old, Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) took apart one of his father’s record players and rebuilt it “so that it played records both forwards and backwards, and by attaching a rubber band around one of the gears I could vary the speed of playback.” In 1949, he learned about the latest audio recording technology of the time from a neighbor who had in his basement a large studio for making 78 rpm records. While studying at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in 1953, he was asked to compose music for the theater department. They had some of the first tape recorders Mumma had seen, and he proceeded to take them apart to see how they worked. Around 1955, after he’d dropped out of college, he had learned enough about electronics to begin designing his own circuits for making electronic music. “Motivated further by broadcasts of musique concrète from France and the early recordings of Les Paul and Mary Ford,”1 making circuits and exploring electronic music became a “nonstop activity.”2 These were his first steps toward a long and distinguished career as a composer, performer, and circuit designer in the field of experimental music.
