Ruth Anderson, a groundbreaking electronic composer who created a relatively small but prescient body of work, including pieces that used bits of recorded speech turned into music, died on Nov. 29 at a hospital in the Bronx. She was 91.

The composer Annea Lockwood, her spouse and only immediate survivor, said the cause was lung cancer.

Ms. Anderson, who made her living chiefly as a flutist in her 20s and as a freelance orchestrator in her 30s, is best known for having founded, in 1968, an electronic music studio at Hunter College in New York, where she taught composition and theory from 1966 until 1989.

She had been introduced to the possibilities of electronic sound while studying in the 1960s at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where she was encouraged by Vladimir Ussachevsky, the center’s leader.

As recounted in “Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States” (2006), by Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Mr. Ussachevsky made a recording of a chamber work by Ms. Anderson but somehow missed a few notes. He showed Ms. Anderson how he had electronically inserted the missing notes and demonstrated further transformations made possible by studio equipment.