A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which also included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma.

In 1960, he left for Rome on a Fulbright grant, where he befriended American expatriate composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski and witnessed performances by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and David Tudor, who inspired him to adopt a more experimental style.

He returned from Rome in 1962 to take up a position at Brandeis as director of the University Chamber Chorus, which presented classical vocal works alongside modern compositions and new commissions.

At a 1963 Chamber Chorus concert at New York's Town Hall, Lucier met Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley, experimental composers who were also directors of the ONCE Festival.

[2] Other key pieces from Lucier's oeuvre include North American Time Capsule (1966), which employed a prototype vocoder to manipulate elements of speech;[3][4] Music On A Long Thin Wire (1977), in which a piano wire is strung across a room and activated by an amplified oscillator and electromagnets;[5][6] Crossings (1982), in which tones play across a steadily rising sine wave to produce beat frequencies;[7] the series Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1973–74), in which beat frequencies between sine waves and acoustic instruments create "troughs" and "valleys" of sound and silence;[7] and Clocker (1978), which uses biofeedback and a digital delay unit.