Kirk Pearson is a composer and creative engineer living in the Bay Area. They spend a lot of time writing music for unconventional musical instruments, and, every once in a while, inventing new ones. Kirk’s sounds have appeared on prime-time television and in internationally touring installations, stage shows, animated cartoons, and hundreds of films, radio productions, and museum exhibits around the globe (in case those kinds of things are interesting to you).

They are the founder and creative director of Dogbotic Labs, a Bay Area laboratory for inquiry-based art. Dogbotic Labs offers virtual workshops in a variety of oft-maligned creative topics, including e-textiles, DIY guitar pedals, film souping, datamoshing, animation, and creative coding. Through these workshops, Kirk has taught thousands of people from over fifty countries how to build a synthesizer.

Kirk’s sounds have been featured in movies at the Sundance Film Festival, on animated shorts for Adult Swim, in PSAs for the UNHCR, and in installations at SXSW and the American Museum of Natural History. Several of their invented instruments can be heard in Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 4, on stage with dream pop band Vansire, heard weekly on WFMU’s Techtonic, and on permanent exhibit at the Oberlin Conservatory. They are the author of Electronic Music From Scratch: a Beginner’s Guide to Homemade Audio Gizmos published by Make.