Biography
Tod Dockstader was born in 1932 in St.Paul, Minnesota. After majoring in psychology and art at the University of Minnesota, he went on to study painting and film, earning money by drawing cartoons for local newspapers and magazines. In 1955, Dockstader moved to Hollywood to work as an apprentice film editor, cutting picture and sound for animated cartoons including "Mr.Magoo" and "Gerald McBoing Boing." He then moved on to writing and storyboarding cartoons.
Dockstader became a self-taught sound engineer and sound effects specialist and apprenticed as a recording engineer in 1958. It was around this time that he started to use his off-work hours at Gotham Recording Studios to experiment with musique concrète. By 1960 he had amassed enough material to assemble his first composition Eight Pieces (later to be used in the soundtrack of Fellini's Satyricon), the last of which was re-worked into his first stereo piece Travelling Music. His last piece at Gotham was Four Telemetry Tapes in 1965, after which he left to work as an audio-visual designer on the Air Canada Pavillion at Montreal's Expo '67. It was around this time that some of Dockstader's pieces were released on three Owl L.P.s, and his work became known to a larger audience (he had previously released some pieces on Folkways). However, he no longer had access to studio facilities and was denied access to the major electronic music centres because of his lack of academic credentials. He therefore concentrated on educational audio-visual productions, and has written and produced hundreds of filmstrips and videos for schools.