Bio

Paul Chávez is a Chicano designer and composer whose work merges art and technology. For more than twenty years, he has worked both as a professional in the audiovisual (AV) industry and as a composer and sound designer for dance and theatre.

His career in audiovisual systems began under the mentorship of Rolly Brook, renowned sound system designer and co-founder of the consulting firm McKay Conant Brook. As a systems design consultant, Paul collaborated with architectural and engineering teams, contributing specifications and drawings for projects such as the UC Santa Cruz School of Music, the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, and the Grossmont College Theater Arts Building.

He later joined Paoletti Consulting in San Francisco, where he designed AV systems for the Getty Center in Los Angeles. At Intellisys Group and MCSi, he continued designing large-scale systems for projects including the Where the Wild Things Are attraction at the Metreon in San Francisco, and the mega yachts Ronin and Rising Sun.

During this early phase of his design career, Paul became increasingly dissatisfied with the user interfaces delivered with AV systems. He questioned why these systems were so difficult to use and why users made frequent mistakes. This curiosity led him to explore the emerging user-centered design movement. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, product development and software industries were asking similar questions. Influential authors such as Donald Norman, Brenda Laurel, Alan Cooper, Steve Krug, and Jef Raskin provided foundational ideas that shaped Paul’s understanding of usability. Drawing on his background as a dance music composer, he recognized the value of creativity, divergent thinking, and interdisciplinary collaboration in solving interface challenges. As he deepened his expertise, he began advocating for better UI design in the AV community—teaching courses on user interface design at InfoComm and writing a column on design and the future for Systems Contractor News.

During this time, Paul transitioned into product development by joining Harman Professional Group—parent company to brands such as JBL, dbx, BSS, AKG, and Crown Audio. Initially brought in to support large-scale projects, he soon realized that most AV manufacturers lacked expertise in UX and UI design. Over the years, his role evolved into one focused on defining and developing new technologies. In 2015, he founded and led Harman’s professional UX and UI design team. Following Harman’s acquisition of AMX and the digital development firm Symphony Teleca, Paul collaborated with designer Vaijayanth Iyengar to lead a global UX/UI design team based in Bangalore. Their team brought contemporary user-centered design practices to the professional AV world. Projects included redefining how musicians use portable PA systems through the Connected PA initiative, and more recently, developing a cloud-based suite of tools that integrates AMX’s video and control systems with Harman’s audio and Martin Lighting technologies. His team's work at Harman earned nominations for both a SXSW Interaction Award and a NAMM TEC Award.

In 2018 Paul joined international engineering firm Arup as an Associate Experience Designer, where he creates interactive environments. During this time he has served as technical director for NowArt’s Luminex, an urban video art event in Downtown Los Angeles that transformed buildings into projection surfaces. Chávez also contributed to numerous commercial and cultural projects, including work for the City of Long Beach, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum, JFK Airport, and Refik Anadol’s soon-to-open Dataland, the first AI-focused museum. At Arup, Paul has written about the need to rethink digital buildings and how we might create built environments that improve the connections between humans to the more-than-human world.

Paul is active in the Los Angeles creative community as a composer, instrumentalist, and sound designer. He often leverages his technical background to create immersive sound environments and scores. His music explores a variety of sonic terrains—from simple, eloquent solo guitar pieces to rhythmically complex works for percussion and found objects, as well as environmental recordings and spoken word–driven electronic soundscapes.
His music embraces Rasquachismo, a Chicano aesthetic rooted in working-class ingenuity and resistance. Characterized by “making the most from the least,” it celebrates hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration as creative strategies.

Often working under the project name FeltLike, Paul studied composition at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara with composers John Carbon and Hagar Kadima, as well as installation artist Ann Hamilton, earning a BA in Music Composition.
He has composed scores for choreographers Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg, Melinda Ring, Morleigh Steinberg, and Sarah Elgart, and has collaborated with video artist Carole Kim and choreographers Shel Wagner Rasch and Stephan Koplowitz (former Dean of the School of Dance at CalArts). His musical collaborators include bassist Mark Dresser, vocalist Carmina Escobar, and guitarists Nels Cline (of Wilco) and The Edge (of U2). He has designed sound for installations by Catherine Opie, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, Carolina Caycedo and Cannupa Hanska-Luger.

Paul’s performances have been featured at the Grec Festival in Barcelona, the Dublin Dance Festival, Descanso Gardens, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Live Arts Theater in New York. He has designed sound installations for the A+D Museum, Regen Projects, The Box Gallery, REDCAT Theater, and Grand Park in Los Angeles.