His work includes THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing).

Famed movie critic Roger Ebert called Murch "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema.

"[3] David Thomson calls Murch "the scholar, gentleman and superb craftsman of modern film", adding that in sound and editing, "he is now without a peer.

[6] He is the grandson of Louise Tandy Murch, a music teacher who was the subject of the 1975 documentary film At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch and of Mary Elizabeth MacCallum Scott, a Canadian physician, educator and Christian medical missionary, who with her husband Thomas Beckett Scott MD, established the Green Memorial Hospital in Manipay, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).

In the summer of 1961 he worked as a music librarian and production assistant at Riverside Church's newly founded radio station WRVR, now WLTW.

Murch spent the university school year 1963–1964 in Europe, studying Romance Languages and the History of Art in Italy at Perugia and in France at the Sorbonne.

While at Johns Hopkins, he met future director/screenwriter Matthew Robbins, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, and philosopher Andrew Feenberg, with whom he staged a number of happenings.

There all three encountered, and became friends with, fellow students such as George Lucas, Hal Barwood, Robert Dalva, Willard Huyck, Don Glut and John Milius; all of these men would go on to be successful filmmakers.

Not long after film school, in 1969, Murch and others joined Francis Ford Coppola and Lucas at American Zoetrope in San Francisco.

[18] Murch has written one book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye (1995),[19] which has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian and Persian.

In response, he invented a modification which concealed the splice by using extremely narrow but strongly adhesive strips of special polyester-silicone tape.

[25] The movie was initially seen and heard in this 70mm six-track format in only 17 theaters, some of which also featured prototypes of the Model 650 subwoofer developed by John and Helen Meyer.

[29] In 2003, Murch edited another Anthony Minghella film, Cold Mountain on Apple's sub-$1000 Final Cut Pro software using off the shelf Power Mac G4 computers.

Murch and Hertfordshire's Head of Post-Production lecturer Howard Berry teamed up to create the documentary Her Name Was Moviola, which received its premiere in 2024.

In 2024 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Ravensbourne University London for his outstanding contribution to cinema and his seminal writings on the craft of film editing.