He was born in Istanbul, and studied composition at the Ankara Conservatory and sound engineering in Paris.
He was also a painter and sculptor, and several of his works are in the permanent collection of the Turkish National Gallery.
In 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
He also designed and installed the electronic music laboratory at Yale University, where he taught from 1961 to 1970, and he established the electronic music program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught from 1971 until his retirement in 1989.
His notable students include Daria Semegen, Conrad Cummings, Jing Jing Luo, Joël-François Durand, John Tabacco and Frederick Bianchi.