He was educated at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Queens College and Princeton University, studying with George Perle and Milton Babbitt, among others.
[1][2] Originally intending to pursue a career in performance, during 1965–66 he played the French horn with the Dorian Wind Quintet.
Other projects included folksong settings (Folk Images), a portrait of a woman (Things She Carried), a contemplation of letters and numbers (Alphabet Book), sounds of the highway (Night Traffic, Ride), blues harmonica, electric guitar, piano improvisation and casual conversation.
In 2000 he was the co-subject (along with Francis Dhomont) of a documentary film made for the European Arte network by Uli Aumüller, My Cinema for the Ears that deals with the use of natural sounds.
A four-chord sequence from Lansky's first large computer piece Mild und leise (1972) was sampled by the English rock band Radiohead for the track "Idioteque" on their 2000 Kid A album.
During the mainframe era computer time was scarce and expensive, and this prompted Lansky to write his own software package called Mix, in Fortran.
This made it easier to assemble a composition voice-by-voice, section-by-section, even note-by-note, avoiding large expensive runs to create an entire piece at once.
When the move was made to minis and micros, Lansky ported Mix to the C programming language and called it CMix.
During the late 1990s a group led by Brad Garton at Columbia University created a version with a scheduler, RtCmix, that was capable of real time synthesis.
This facilitated the creation of complex textures in works such as Idle Chatter, which contain thousands of short notes, frequently selected using random methods.
Percussionists in particular were attracted by pieces such as Table’s Clear, which resembles a gamelan made of pots and pans, and the "chatter" series.
Significant commissions came from the Library of Congress and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the wind quintet The Long and Short of It, and Chamber Music America for a trio for the Janus Trio, Book of Memory, and for Sō Percussion, Springs.
Earlier examples of this are his computer pieces Guy's Harp, about blues harmonica, and Not So Heavy Metal, about rock and roll guitar.