Born in Paris in 1929, Michel Fano undertook long studies at the Conservatoire de Paris (harmony, fugue, composition) during which his studies with Messiaen would be most significant to him. It was in Messaien’s home that he met Jean Barraqué and Pierre Boulez. He was an active participant in the Domaine Musical, where his Sonate pour deux pianos (1952) was performed, opening the way for “generalized” serialism. In parallel, Fano met Pierre-Jean Jouve, with whom he authored an authoritative study of Anton Berg‘s Wozzeck (1953), an experience that would exert tremendous influence on his thinking about sound in cinema later on.

Fano was called up to serve in the French military in Algeria in 1956. Upon returning to France, he worked in film, as a sound engineer. With his brother Jacques, he founded the production company Son Aurafilms, which coproduced the films of Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad). Fano was fascinated by literature and the Nouveau Roman movement, and with Alain Robbe-Grillet directed the “sound scores” of L’Immortelle (1963), Playing With Fire (1975), and The Man Who Lies (1968) - the latter he considered to be his best contribution. He also created the highly elaborate soundtracks to two animal films by François Bel and Gérard Vienne, Le Territoire des autres (1970), of which he was also a co-director, and La Griffe et la dent (1976).

In addition to his extensive contributions to film, Michel Fano also directed many music documentaries, including a series of seven television films titled Introduction à la musique contemporaine (Introduction to Contemporary Music) in 1980. He taught sound engineering at the IDHEC and the FÉMIS, where he chaired the Sound department, as well as at the Centre National de la Bande dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, and at the INSAS film school in Brussels. He was a regularly invited guest instructor outside of France, notably in Cuba. For several years, he was chair of G.R.E.C. (Groupe de Recherches et d’Essais Cinématographiques) and of the SACEM’s Commission Supérieure technique de l’image et du son (high-level technical committee on image and sound) and its Commission symphonique. He worked actively on a number of computer tools and studied writing and composition software at the IRCAM before becoming one of its administrators, at the request of Pierre Boulez. He returned briefly to composition in 1995 with the cycle Fab and continued working on sound, establishing himself as a major specialist in the relationship between sound and image.