Anderson has been called a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds. Over the course of her career, she has collaborated with a wide range of artists including William Burroughs, Adrian Belew, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Peter Gabriel, and her late husband Lou Reed.