Yeray.

Yeray, the Atlantic canary, opens his notebook the moment he crosses the threshold of home. Squared paper, dog-eared corners and a strip of paper masking tape with one word written by hand: "N‑E". It isn't a password or a gesture for the camera. It's the way he decides, before anything else, whether that day calls for heading up to the green edges or staying in the city.

When he goes out early, before the tram fills up and before La Laguna turns up the volume, he closes the door carefully so as not to wake the neighbours in the courtyard. He puts on the blue knitted hat —for warmth and out of habit— and pulls up the grey collar of the layer underneath. The multicoloured knitted jumper looks too cheerful for someone who works in silence, but it serves him as a practical signal: if you see him cross, you know he's going to do something specific, not to improvise.

There are mornings when he records nothing. He just walks, notes down "breeze", "echo", "metal door" and comes back. Other times he comes into the station with cold fingers, pours himself a coffee and starts what almost no one sees: cleaning, trimming and labelling so that a sound isn't just a sound, but a memory with a date, a place and permission.

Yeray lives in La Laguna, in a flat where ventilation is a household rule. It isn't a pretty phrase or a mysterious quirk: if the air goes still, his body notices straight away. That's why he opens windows before sitting down to work and why he avoids closed places with smoke or strong perfumes. If he has to talk to someone and the air is heavy, he suggests going outside without making a drama of it: "better out here".

His home is small, but it's organised as if it were a studio. There's a table with the audio interface, a hook where the headphones hang, a little box of cables labelled by colour and a high stool beside a window. He likes to work a little raised up, in natural light. In the kitchen there's the basics: bread, fruit, nuts. He grazes more than he sits down to long meals. If he skips breakfast, you can hear it in his voice.

On the balcony there are two hardy plants and a folding chair. He doesn't keep them as "decoration": he keeps them because they remind him that the air moves, that there's life beyond the archive. On hazy calima days, that chair stays inside and the window opens just a crack. He doesn't get angry at the weather; he adjusts his plan and that's that.

The knitted jumper has a clear role in that life: it's a soft layer that lets him move, carry a backpack and sit on the floor sorting material without feeling "office-dressed". The blue hat, on the other hand, is a soft boundary. When he puts it on, the noise of the world goes down, and so does his own.

At the local university radio station, Yeray isn't the person who "goes on air" by default. He's the person who makes everything sound right. He sets levels, prevents feedback, reviews recordings and, above all, keeps order. His archive isn't a cloud folder with generic names: each folder carries a date, a place, a sentence of context and, when needed, an ethical note about permissions.

Years ago he made a small mistake that left a large mark: he broadcast a fragment in which someone from the neighbourhood was recognisable, without meaning to. There was no scandal. No public consequences. But a physical shame stayed with him, as if his throat had closed. Ever since, his rule is clear: if a person could be left exposed, the audio is cut or deleted.

That rule led him to invent another way of working. Instead of recording "about" people, he leads listening walks. They're short walks, in a small group, where it's decided what gets recorded and what doesn't. Sometimes the group only listens and nothing is kept. Sometimes a stretch of wind between buildings or the echo of a corridor is recorded. Yeray translates what he hears into actions: "there's more calm here", "the metal bounces here", "the birdsong mixes with the traffic here".

In the workshops with schools you see another side of him: not the technician's, but the translator's. He asks for silence without imposing it, suggests simple games ("close your eyes and count three sounds") and teaches them to stop. If a child speeds up, he turns the volume down a notch, opens a window and carries on. He doesn't moralise. He adjusts the surroundings.

His trade has conflicts that aren't talked about much: people who ask for "just one audio" without permission, events that want volume over clarity, meetings that drag on without order. He answers them all with the same thing: precision. He asks what exactly they need, offers three options and delivers the one he promises.

Yeray's life isn't built for large groups. It holds together in small format.

In his home there's a presence whose schedule doesn't match his: Luz, a Cory's shearwater who works at night near the north coast. Her shifts and Yeray's cross at an odd point: he leaves as she comes back. They don't live the bond as an epic story; they live it as affectionate logistics. Thermos flasks on the table, short messages, a note that says "windy today; don't go up the mountain". The biology shows in the everyday: like the birds that take turns caring for one another, they learn not to ask the other for the impossible.

At work, his most stable friendship isn't always in person. Bruno, a praying mantis who lives in Valencia, shares an odd interest with him: how the city sounds when you don't try to make it sound "pretty". They swap short clips, hypotheses and protocols. Bruno pushes him to simplify; Yeray pushes him not to skip permissions. They look out for each other with craft.

And there's his family, who turn up without grand speeches. His mother keeps the clean-air rule as if it were an inherited habit. His grandmother —the one who taught him to recognise the neighbourhood by its sounds— is still the anchor when Yeray gets too demanding with himself. And his father, who doesn't fully understand the archive, understands something more useful: when Yeray is at his limit. Sometimes he calls and only says "did you eat?". It irritates Yeray and saves him at the same time.

They don't talk about "emotional management". They talk about concrete things: "eat something", "open the window", "don't work so late". With Yeray it works better that way.

Yeray likes mornings with soft light, inner courtyards where the sound is muffled and one-to-one conversations. He likes early coffee and he likes walking without headphones so he can listen to his surroundings. He likes objects that can be named without marketing: a notebook, a cable, a battery. And, contradictory as it seems, he likes colours. Not as decoration, but as a sign of life and as visibility when he crosses half-empty streets.

He avoids tobacco smoke with the same firmness with which other people avoid a bad night. He avoids strong perfumes. He avoids sharp bangs and slammed doors. He avoids meetings where no one decides anything. He avoids vague promises. The moment he senses that a conversation is going to turn into shouting, he cuts it off before it escalates. He doesn't leave out of superiority: he leaves because his body reads it as danger.

He has a particular way of regulating himself: small sounds. He doesn't always sing; sometimes he just hums three notes while connecting a cable or while walking down a narrow street. He does it to mark a rhythm, the way others pat their pocket to check they've got their keys. If someone hears him, they might think he's happy. He's really just tuning himself.

There's a small mystery he carries: a deleted audio he doesn't talk about. It isn't some great secret out of a novel. It's a mistake he doesn't want to spin into a story. Sometimes, when he's alone editing and hears a laugh too close to the microphone, he goes still for a second and switches tasks.

Yeray's future depends less on talent than on his capacity to close things off.

On the bright path, his archive becomes a tool: it's folded into an island education project, helping people learn to listen to their city and its green edges without invading them. Yeray learns to call a piece of work good once it does its job. He doesn't re-record ten times. He shares, with clear conditions, and lets himself be helped.

On the dark path, he doesn't break: he shrinks. He becomes a rigid guardian of the archive, stops sharing out of fear of getting it wrong, and his world grows smaller. He'd still be competent. He'd only lose the pleasure of going out to walk without recording.

For now, what keeps him on the good side is simple and repeatable: an open window, a thermos, a short list, and the certainty that listening can be a form of care if it's done with permission and with humility.