Carlos Sandoval was born in Mexico city in 1956. He now holds a dual Mexican-German passport/nationality. Having abandoned his studies at Escuela Nacional de Música UNAM 1976-79 (classical guitar and composition), Sandoval went on to study composition, analysis and theory, privately, with Julio Estrada (1985–90).  His first German project was "Mextoys".  This piece constituted a breakthrough in Sandoval's work: it was his first true "phenomenological" work, his first full multimedia piece and his first work joining video and music into a single conceptual and constructive layer. This point marked Sandoval's departure from traditional score writing and deterministic thinking, towards developing either an experience-oriented cognitive approach to music and a cognitive Piagetian approach to animism towards music and life in general, within concepts like "Lifework", "Empathy and Subjectivity", "Evidence", "Intuition", "Intentionality of consciousness" and, last but not least, Techno-ethics. 

His works have been commissioned or programmed in some of the most important festivals wolrdwide, like the Donaueschinger Musiktage(1992 and 2015), the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2007) or the Klangsuren Schwaz (2016), among others. He works intesively with the Ensemble Mosaik. Recently he has been commissioned by the NDR (DE), the ensamble mosaik (DE), the American Society (USA), the Siemens Stifftung (DE), the Grazer Kunstverein (AU) and the foundation Alumnos 47 (MX). He was fellow of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Creadores (1999 2018).