Her mother, Gertrude Kulberg Shapiro, was from a Romanian Jewish family that had immigrated to Minneapolis.

[3] Her father, Morse Shapiro, was from a Lithuanian and Polish Jewish family that had immigrated to Minneapolis via New York City.

Bamberger went on to the University of California, Berkeley where she studied with Roger Sessions, receiving an MA in Music Theory in 1951.

[3] Bamberger was appointed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to 2001, where she taught in the Music and Theater Arts Section.

[6] MusicLogo enabled students to write code to create tunes that could be immediately played out loud.

Freed from the need to master musical notation or performance, students could then spend more time constructing tunes and reflecting on the process.

Because the kind of real programming that was part of MusicLogo was not readily accessible to teachers or young students, an easier-to-use software Impromptu was born and its accompanying book, Developing Musical Intuition.

They had two sons: Paul Simon, who is a labour lawyer, and Joshua David, who is a physician in family medicine, taking care of homeless people.