Michel Gonneville, born in Montréal in 1950, began piano studies at a very early age. Later, and after some significant musical shocks (Ravel, then Messiaen, Boulez, Tremblay, Xenakis and Stockhausen) he made the definitive choice to study music. He received his bachelor of music from the École Vincent-d'Indy where he studied from 1968 to 1972, and one year later, he opted for composition, enrolling in the composition and analysis class of Gilles Tremblay at the Montréal Conservatory (he won premiers prix in both subjects in 1974 and 1975).
Since 1974 he attended to the Stockhausen seminars, and took three semesters of composition classes with Stockhausen in Cologne; he also worked in the electronic music studio of the Musikhochschule in the same city under the direction of Hans Ulrich Humpert. He then became the student and personal assistant of Henri Pousseur in Liège. During those three years in Europe, he also studied with Johannes Fritsch, Rolf Gelhaar and Frederick Rzewski.