Bosco Kante — stage name Bosko — grew up in Portland making music, making beats and rapping with friends. He came from a musical family, his great-grandfather had a jazz band, his mom played French horn. Math was the other strong family trait: his grandmother and mother both taught math. When he connected with the Oregon MESA program at Grant High School, he started thinking bigger: setting his sights on prestigious universities and going after scholarships. He ended up at the University of Southern California where he studied engineering and translated his love of making music into a career that started with him composing the theme song to the television show In Living Color and morphed into a music industry expertise in the art of talk box — the tech enabled effects unit that projects the sounds of speech onto a musical instrument. True to his Oregon MESA roots, Bosco has invented the ElectroSpit ESX-1 mobile phone-enabled talk box. He recently had the chance to show off the innovation to his lifelong idol Stevie Wonder. “I didn’t know that you could be a music producer, let alone create a new instrument, let alone build a business to produce the instruments,” Bosco says. “I’ve always just followed my interests. Whatever the skill that’s necessary – I can gain it. Practice and research. It’s taken me a lot of cool places.”