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The story of Paik's life follows a global trajectory. Born into a prominent family in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, he studied musical composition and art at the University of Tokyo. At age twenty-four, after completing a thesis on Arnold Schönberg and graduating with a degree in aesthetics, Paik traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in twentieth-century music—first attending the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where he met composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and then returning two years later to settle in Cologne, where he worked at the Westdeutsche Rundfunk's Studio for Electronic Music. (Stockhausen was based in the city, and it was there that Paik would meet John Cage.) Paik's studies led him to focus on musical composition as sequences of events unfolding over time: His notations mapped actions in addition to tones. One consequence of this technique was that Paik's individual pieces could not be duplicated—leading Stockhausen and György Ligeti to suggest that films be made of Paik's concerts as a means to establish scores. That never happened, but their suggestion is an indication of Paik's improvisational approach and commitment to the idea of musical composition as performance.