He is the author of The Technique of Electronic Music (Macmillan) and has been involved professionally with computer music for over thirty years. He has received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ohio Arts Council, Soros Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, Pennsylvania Arts Council, Ohio Humanities Council, and others, and has served on executive boards of national composers' organizations. He has served on panels at the NEA, and Ohio Arts Council. In 1990 he received the Governor's Award for Outstanding Individual Artist in the State of Ohio.

Wells was the conference co-chair for the 1984 American Society of University Composer's National Conference, as well as the co-chair of the 1989 International Computer Music Conference, both held in Columbus, Ohio. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of The Society of Composers, Inc., as Manager of the COMPOSERVER, Streaming-Audio Archive of new music at http://composerver.sss.arts.ohio-state.edu.

His works include over a dozen works for electroacoustic media; chamber music, orchestra music, and concertos. Recent performances of his music include his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the Spokane Symphony and Into Darkness, computer-generated music, which was performed at the International Brazil Symposium on Computer Music, the Korean Electroacoustic Music Society in Seoul, Korea, at the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the U.S. national conference in Ithaca, New York, and also at the Society of Composers National Conference. He is also active as collaborative pianist, in a saxophone/piano duo, with his colleague, James Hill, Professor of Saxophone at The Ohio State University. His Recitative and Aria for saxophone and piano was premiered by Hill at the World Saxophone Congress in 1979, and Noctume for Saxophone and Computer-Generated Sounds was premiered at the World Saxophone Congress in 1985.

During the winter of 1997 Wells traveled to Belgrade, Yugoslavia on a ArtsLink Fellowship to compose a collaborative work of electroacoustic music with composer Vladan Radovanovic, and give lectures and presentations there.