Karl Schultz is a composer, sound designer, and audio engineer for film, video games, and concert music.
Deeply immersed in music and sound from an early age, Karl’s childhood was spent in a heady mixture of
piano, violin, classical music as well as the, Sega Genesis, SNES, and Sony PlayStation. As a result, Karl
is equally conversant at writing catchy chiptunes as he is writing for a 70-instrument orchestra. Karl’s
work seamlessly blends acoustic instruments with modern electronic synthesizers and tuneful melodies to
create a style of music for media that is at once contemporary yet assuredly classic. An emerging force in
the world of new media, Karl’s music and sound design have appeared in several independent video games and
films. A film he recently scored, “The Altruist,” has appeared in multiple film festivals in 2020 and has
been awarded in several of them including the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival and the Florida Film Festival.
Educated in and around Silicon Valley, having recently completed a professional degree at the Technology and
Applied Composition program at the San Francisco Conservatory, Karl is always current with the latest
advances in audio technology and software. A skilled audio recording and mixing engineer, he is equally
comfortable recording musicians and foley in the studio as he is recording live sound effects out of doors.
Passionate about
interactive audio, he is
thoroughly
versed in middleware software such as Wwise as well as
game engines like Unity and Unreal. Unapologetically nerdy, Karl knows multiple programming languages
including C#, C++ and Max/MSP and is constantly looking for new ways to create and implement sound in the
digital domain.
Outside of media, Karl maintains a career in classical concert music having written for all the forms in the
genre including symphonies, operatic arias, chamber music, solo piano and everything else in between.
Following the
neo-classic tradition of modern
music
embodied by luminaries such as Stravinsky, Hindemith,
and Prokofiev, he writes music that is by turns lyrical, yet also mordant and ironic. Karl has developed a
systematic approach to the writing of polytonal counterpoint, forging a new polyphonic style for the
twenty-first century.
Karl studied classical composition under David Conte, Michel Merlet, and Michael Johanson and media composition under Lennie Moore. He holds a professional degree in technology and applied composition and a master’s degree in music composition, both from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as well as a bachelor’s degree in music from Lewis and Clark College. Passionate about education, he has given music lessons to dozens of students and served a year in AmeriCorps, teaching music in the public schools. Karl is a lifelong resident of the West Coast. He currently lives in Seattle.
