Kota Hoshino

(born April 23, 1975) is a Japanese composer and sound designer. As part of FromSoftware’s sound team, Hoshino is best known for composing multiple games in the Armored Core series and as the bassist and vocalist of FreQuency. Career Kota Hoshino was born in Tokyo, Japan on April 23, 1975, and studied at Surugadai University. Hoshino began working at FromSoftware in spring of 1998, feeling that his music would complement the games’ visuals. His first role was composing music for Shadow Tower for the PlayStation. As the game uses very little music, many of Hoshino’s contributions were unused, though some unused tracks were later used in Evergrace. The same year, he contributed music for Echo Night. Hoshino stated that he cannot read music, so he usually does not compose orchestral scores. Hoshino was the composer and sound designer for Evergrace, which released in 2000 for the PlayStation 2. For the soundtrack, Hoshino used voices as the primary instrument, editing samples of his own with Sound Forge to create an “ethnic” sound, in addition to instruments including shakuhachi, shamisen, and synthesized percussion. Following the game’s release, Hoshino worked mainly on sound design,