After 8 years of studying piano, he began to be involved in percussion music at the age of 14, and gradually turned towards the rhythmic cultures of the Far-East.

In 1999 he received a grant to the Department of Traditional Music of Indonesian Academy of Arts, where he studied the powerful, dynamic Western dialect of Javanese Gamelan music. Later he continued his studies in Vienna with his master, Mamat Rahmat, on the Sundanese drum, kendang.

As the fulfilment of his ambitions, he became personally involved in South Indian music in 2003. He obtained the basics from Murugan Mohan, the percussionist then based in Budapest, and later continued with Iván Nyusztay on the mridangam, the South Indian double-headed, barrel-shaped drum, which in its function and significance is the Southern version of the tabla. In the end of 2005 he met his present guru, Trichy Sankaran, one of the cultic performers of South Indian classical music of worldwide acknowledgement.

Kornél Magyar is interested in finding the meeting points between the traditional musical systems and rhythmical structures of India and Java, and their common application in contemporary European ensemble music. He has played with a number of renowned Hungarian musicians as featuring percussionist.