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Mel-filterbanks are fixed, engineered audio features which emulate human perception and have been used through the history of audio understanding up to today. However, their undeniable qualities are counterbalanced by the fundamental limitations of handmade representations. In this talk, I will present LEAF, a new, lightweight, fully learnable neural network that can be used as a drop-in replacement of mel-filterbanks. LEAF learns all operations of audio features extraction, from filtering to pooling, compression and normalization, and can be integrated into any neural network at a negligible parameter cost, to adapt to the task at hand. I will show how LEAF outperforms mel-filterbanks on a wide range of audio signals, including speech, music, audio events and animal sounds, providing a general-purpose learned frontend for audio classification.