Biography

I was born in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1972. I spent my childhood in Ipís, Goicoechea (see satellite photos). I made my elementary school at Centro Educativo Roberto Cantillano Vindas and my high school at Liceo Salvador Umaña Castro. In 1993, my family moved to Barrio El Socorro, in San Miguel, Santo Domingo, Heredia (see satellite photos). In 2001, I moved to the USA to do a PhD in Computer Engineering at University of Florida. In 2002 I married Alexandra, and our daughter Melissa was born in 2006. Alex and I obtained our PhDs in 2007.

Since I was a child, I was interested in computers. An uncle taught me some programming basics. Knowing only the use of if, input, print, and goto, and how to generate random numbers, I programmed a very primitive baseball game (something like a board game), at the age of 12.

When I was in high school my interests changed a little bit. At that time, there were some musical bands in my country that were very popular. I used to hear them on the radio and see them on TV, but I wanted to see them live in concert. One day I finally had the opportunity to do it, and when they started playing, I felt so many shivers down my spine that I knew that my destiny was to be a musician. After insisting for about one year, my father finally bought me a synthesizer. Every day after school, I used to spend hours learning how to play it. After one year of hard work, my dream of playing in a band finally came true.

When I finished high school, I enrolled in the School of Music at the National University. At the same time, I played in some of the most popular musical bands in my country. When I finished the Music core courses, I had to take a decision: to continue majoring in Music Education or Piano Performance. The former would imply spending the rest of my life teaching children in schools how to play recorder. The latter, spending many hours practicing scales, arpeggios, etc. None of them sounded attractive to me… Hence, I left the idea of majoring in Music and decided to go back to my old passion: computers.

I enrolled in the BS program of the School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University of Costa Rica. As time passed, I realized that there were many interesting applications of computers to music. Some applications, like sequencers and audio editors, were already very successful, but some others, like automatic music transcribers, still needed a lot of improvement to be of practical use.

With the goal of advancing the state of the art in automatic music transcription, after finishing my B.S., I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Computer Engineering at the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida. However, I did much of my coursework and doctoral research in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in the Hybrid Group of the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory, under the supervision of Dr. John G. Harris. I also did some research on voice quality in the Voice Acoustics and Perception Laboratory directed by Dr. Rahul Shrivastav in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

My doctoral dissertation was “SWIPE: A Sawtooth Waveform Inspired Pitch Estimator for Speech and Music.”^*. SWIPE was tested using numerous speech and musical instruments recordings, and showed better performance than numerous previous pitch estimators. SWIPE has made an important contribution to the area of pitch estimation, and consequently to the area of automatic music transcription.

^* Click here to download a ZIP file containing the WAV files cited in the dissertation. To play them from the PDF file, put the WAV files in the same directory as the PDF.