Personal interests

I love writing and playing music. I play several musical instruments to varying degrees of success. Mainly the piano, the accordion, and the acoustic guitar. But I also pretend to play the violin, the flute, and typical Brazilian percussion instruments, such as the zabumba and the triangle. I used to play the accordion in a forró band named Quaraçá, meaning sun ray or sun light in a Brazilian indigenous language. Forró is a folk music genre from the Northeast of Brazil that I somehow still manage to dance in the US (well, before 2020).

I worked in many recording studios back in Brazil (most small, some even smaller), which is actually how I got into electrical engineering and signal processing. Earlier during the pandemic, I went back to recording some music in my bedroom. You can listen to some of it at LFO Chamon.

More recently, I made a guest appearance in one of my friend's YouTube channel singing (if you can call that "singing") one of my favorite Greek songs.

 

 

Besides music, I also like reading and learning about different cultures and languages. I pretend to know some psychology (nothing clinical) and philosophy, particularly philosophy of science and probability. I've also been pretending to speak Greek for a couple of years now. I don't always pretend very well.

I am part of a group of soccer lovers that created the Philadelphia Open Soccer (or on Facebook), a program that teaches soccer to kids in public schools of West Philadelphia. We have grown a lot this past couple of years with new volunteers and started a program geared towards immigrants and refugees in Northeast Philadelphia.

Although I don't take soccer as seriously as you'd expect from a Brazilian, I do like watching the Seleção (Brazilian national team). I understand if right now the thought of mentioning the 2014 7-1 fiasco against Germany crossed your mind. Let me get back to you when your national team also manages to win five World Cups...