Karel Barnoski
artist · musician · builder
Karel Barnoski is a composer and pianist who writes and plays his own music. He also builds the tools that let you see it: Resonance, which turns each recording into a film, and the dream lab, an AI agent that invents a new piece from his music every week.
“I make music the way some people keep a journal. I sit down and jam, record it in the moment, then shape the best of it into pieces.”
The story
His first album, Welcome Home, was self-produced at home during the Covid quarantine: thirteen pieces written and recorded alone, a diary of that strange stretch of time. Since then he has released Surrounded by Light, Before the Sun Comes Up, March Light and the Snowflake EP, and recorded Vigil, seven solo pieces from one night in the studio.
His harmony leans toward suspension rather than resolution: held bass tones, open voicings, chords that color a moment more than they lead somewhere.
Every piece on this site plays as a film. They come from Resonance, the studio he built to understand his recordings and give each one its own light. In October 2026 its first installation, Tramokyo, played his music for sixteen hours in the desert.
He also designed the dream agent: an autonomous AI that works from his recordings, builds a new experiment each week, and answers to a second agent that critiques it. More than twelve hundred pieces so far, all public in the dream lab.
Sound has run through his whole working life. He founded 2octave, an audio design studio that made award-winning sounds for products from digital cameras to kitchen appliances, and wrote for UX Magazine on how sound shapes the way we experience things. Trained as an illustrator and computer artist, he leads product design at Workday by day.
“Sound is perceived very much in the same way as any other stimuli. By manipulating sound, you can affect the user’s perception of an experience.”
In the press
Interviews, articles, talks, patents and awards across music, sound and design.
- 2024Car, washing machine or vacuum: the everyday objects that pass through a sound designer’s hands (and ears)↗Interview · Le Temps · T magazine · by Julie ZauggA feature on the sound of everyday things, in the Swiss daily’s T magazine. Karel is introduced as a California sound designer who has worked for Whirlpool, Microsoft and Kodak.“Luxury carmakers like BMW and Mercedes tune the latches and other metal parts of the door mechanism so the door closes with a satisfying sound: heavy, to suggest safety, and precise, to signal quality.”“Every time we hear those distinctive sounds, they stir a familiar emotion.”“If you want to communicate something urgent, like a truck about to back up or a patient on a ventilator getting worse, you need a loud, dissonant, high-frequency sound that grabs attention. If you want to tell someone they have switched on an electronic product successfully, a short scale that feels like an unfinished melody, C–G–F for example, does that.”Karel's quotes, translated from the French. The full article is in French.Sound
- 2021How car sound is engineered for driving pleasure↗Article · PD Insurance · quotedQuoted as an award-winning audio designer: “Through sound, you can make a product as elegant, simple, or complex as you desire.”Sound
- 2020Filtering a large group of devices↗Patent · U.S. patent 10,541,860 · GE · with Clifford Collins, Wai Loon Fong and Peter IngulliA way to find and act on the right devices among millions, by their attributes and event history, for GE's industrial software.Design
- 2018Auditory messages for physiological monitoring devices↗Patent · U.S. patent 9,907,512 · GE · with James KleissSeven categories of alert sounds for medical monitors, each designed from how clinicians actually perceive sound, so an alarm says what it means.SoundDesign
- 2014Spotlight on New Technology AwardAward · Offshore Technology ConferenceFor SeaLytics, the blowout-preventer monitoring and predictive maintenance application he designed for GE Oil & Gas.Design
- 2013Design at Scale↗Talk · Lean Day West · workshop with Dane PetersonA half-day workshop on design systems, sketching and prototyping for enterprise UX.Design
- 2009Product Sonification↗Interview · UX MagazineOn how sound shapes the way people perceive a product, why it is worth designing, and the technology behind it.SoundDesign
- 2005Sound design for Kodak's digital camerasProject · 2octave for KodakHis audio design studio partnered with Kodak on the sound design for its 2005 digital camera line.Sound
- 2004Melissa and the Magic PenBook · Publish America · illustrationsA children's book he illustrated.Design
Press kit
For venues, festivals and writers: a photo and two bios, free to use with credit.
Karel Barnoski is a composer and pianist who writes and plays his own music. He also builds the tools that let you see it: Resonance, which turns each recording into a film, and the dream lab, an AI agent that invents a new piece from his music every week.
Karel Barnoski is a composer and pianist who writes and plays his own music. Most of it begins as improvisation, played in the moment and recorded, then shaped into pieces. His albums include Welcome Home, recorded at home during the Covid quarantine, Surrounded by Light, Before the Sun Comes Up and March Light. Every piece has its own film, made with Resonance, the studio he built to understand and visualize his recordings, and his first installation, Tramokyo, played his music for sixteen hours in the desert in October 2026. He also built the dream lab, an autonomous AI agent that creates a new interactive piece from his recordings every week. He has designed with sound for most of his career, from founding the audio design studio 2octave to leading product design at Workday.
performances, installations, licensing, or hello
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