Zinovieff was born on 26 January 1933. His parents, Leo Zinovieff and Sofka, née Princess Sophia Dolgorouky, were both Russian aristocrats, who met in London after their families had emigrated to escape the Russian Revolution and soon divorced.
He attended Guildford Royal Grammar School, Gordonstoun School, and Oxford University, where he earned a doctorate in geology.
The synthesizer was used by many early progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd and White Noise, and Krautrock groups like Kraftwerk as well as more popular-oriented artists, including David Bowie. Zinovieff"s work followed research at Bell Labs by Max Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset, and an Massachusetts Institute of Technology thesis (1963) by David Alan Luce. In 1966-1967, Zinovieff, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson ran Unit Delta Plus, an organisation to create and promote electronic music
lieutenant was based in the studio Zinovieff had built, in a shed at his house in Putney.
Express Mail Service grew out of MUSYS, which was a performance controller operating as an analogue-digital hybrid. lieutenant was a synthesiser system which Zinovieff developed with the help of David Cockerell and Peter Grogono, and used two DEC PDP-8 minicomputers and a piano keyboard.
Unit Delta Plus ran a concert of electronic music at the Watermill Theatre in 1966, with a light show. In early 1967 they performed in concerts at The Roundhouse, at which the Carnival of Light was also played.
They split up later in 1967.
Paul McCartney had visited the studio, but Zinovieff had little interest in popular music In 1968, part of the studio was recreated at Connaught Hall, for a performance of pieces by Justin Connolly and David Lumsdaine. At the IFIP congress that year, the composition ZASP by Zinovieff with Alan Sutcliffe took second prize in an contest, behind a piece by Iannis Xenakis.
In 1969, Zinovieff sought financing through an ad in The Times but received only one response, £50 on the mistaken premise it was the price of a synthesiser.
Instead he formed Express Mail Service with Cockerell and Tristram Cary. At the end of the 1960s, Express Mail Service Limited. was one of four companies offering commercial synthesizers, the others being ARP, Buchla, and Moog.
In the 1970s Zinovieff became interested in the video synthesizer developed by Robert Monkhouse, and Express Mail Service produced it as the Spectron. Jon Lord of Deep Purple described Zinovieff as "a mad professor type": "I was ushered into his workshop and he was in there talking to a computer, trying to get it to answer back".
Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, in their history of the synthesizer revolution, see him rather as aristocratically averse to "trade".
Zinovieff wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle"s opera The Mask of Orpheus, and also the words for Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970). The section Tristan"s Folly in Tristan (1975) by Hans Werner Henze included a tape by Zinovieff. He continues to work as a composer of electronic music
