Bye year 12,023 of the Human Era, and welcome 12,024. Before the pandemic things were going way too fast and months basically felt like weeks. After the pandemic, years feel like months. And so it goes.

12,023 was marked by extensive world travels (in less than half a year I was in 4 different continents –which is rather embarrassing from a climate change perspective), the acceptance of the wild fact that I’m General Co-Chair for ISMIR 2024, the transfer of some cool audio AI stuff into Premiere Pro, the publication of my first paper at CVPR, and the epic shows with La Bossa d’Urina and Rumbahía. Oh, and I also turned 40, whatever that means. Oh, and I also became AMERICAN (fuck yeah), and that certainly means FREEDOM.

Here the highlights, more or less chronologically:

• Start of the year with friends in my hometown. Everyone has kids. I feel old.
• Enjoying my BART + bike commutes.
• I’m the best man in a wedding in New Zealand (by the titans Theo & Matt!). What an incredible country.
• Date in Sidney thanks to Auckland’s airport flooding.
• We ski quite a bit. Anita is getting so good at it. Lake Tahoe is my happy place.
• Spent a long weekend in Breckenridge with my beloved sisis, the Doc.
• Rumbahía is back and we play a few really fun shows.
• The more time I spend in Oakland, the more I love the most incredible animal: the colibrí
• One of my dearest friends from elementary school visits us for 10 days and we have an absolute blast (oh, hello Yosemite!).
• Bay to Breakers is the best race. And we’re “flamingos” this year.
• We present our work on Audio and Natural Language Processing at ICASSP in Greece. What an incredible island!
• We present our work on Instrument Source Separation at CVPR in Vancouver (even though I don’t get to go there).
• The day I turn 40, I begin the day in Rome, I fly to Barcelona in the morning, my sister surprises me in the airport (she was supposed to be in Colorado), we go to the best restaurant in Barcelona, and finally dinner in the best Asian restaurant in my hometown. Can’t complain about my 5th decade on this planet, so far.
• I throw a party in Barcelona and I feel so lucky to have so many amazing humans around me.
• Best Pau Vallvé show I’ve seen. He’s my favorite Catalan artist, by far.
• I perform at the Adobe office with other Adobe titans.
• We present a paper on Efficient Language Detection Models at Interspeech in Dublin, but I don’t get to go because…
• I become American!
• This year I get to create some “art” for Burning Man: the crazy color lights for our camp Camposanto. They turn out really amazing. And they survive the rain.
• Another year playing with La Bossa d’Urina at Burning Man.
• Rain at Burning Man was epic.
• My mom and her partner come to visit us in Oakland and we have such a fantastic time. And she hikes to the top of Nevada Falls in Yosemite!
• Audio Auto-Tagging and Language Recognition (part of the Text-Based Editing Feature) are released in Premiere Pro, two projects that I’ve been heavily involved with.
• We throw the 4th annual karaoke weekend in Mendocino.
• We throw an epic Halloween party at Brick n Mortar with Rumbahía.
• My favorite rock band from Spain, Viven, releases its 3rd album, and I am featured on its first track. I can’t believe it. The whole album is pure joy.
• We present our paper on Sound Effects Retrieval using High-Quality SFX Libraries and Videos at WASPAA, in upstate NY. Our amazing intern, Julia Wilkins, who is the first author, gets to go and present it.
• I travel to Milan for ISMIR 2023 and to present our candidacy for ISMIR 2024. Look at these handsome ex-/Pandas.
• I go to Barcelona after Milan and spend some time with the most titanic grandfather ever.
• We tour with La Bossa d’Urina, using in-ear monitors for the first time, and playing our largest show ever in Granollers.
• Cybertrucks are released and they’re hilarious.
• NeuralDSP Archetype plugins are INSANE.
• We’re back climbing at the very least two days a week in Pacific Pipe. I feel young.
• Christmas with Anita’s family in Pasadena Merda Fena.
• New Year’s Eve in Baja California with Anita. We swim with whale sharks and it’s absolutely incredible.

See you next month year!