Hirokazu Kato

Hirokazu Kato took part in the innovative engineering team at Yamaha in Japan who utilized FM Synthesis to create an electronic musical instrument, first the TRX prototype and then the revolutionary DX7.  Kato-san began his career with Yamaha in 1965 when he helped design the company's first clarinet while working in the wind instrument division.  After becoming Systems Engineer and studying at Columbia University, he returned to Japan where he worked on sound processing chips and the LSI technology required when John Chowning's discoveries of FM Synthesis became the framework for a new generation of synthesizers. And this is just the beginning of Kato's contributions!