NB time codes are a rough guide only. they are retained from the original audio, which has since been edited for clarity and continuity.

James Parker: OK. Fantastic. Well, if you're OK to begin, shall we just begin? Maybe you could start off by introducing yourself, however feels right to begin with, and we can go on from there. OK. Go for it.

[00:01:19] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: Let's see. Well, I was born in France, in Marseilles, you know, up in the South. I studied there until I went to Paris at the Ecole Polytechnique, and I hesitated between multiple professions. Was I going to be an architect or was I going into electronic music or computers? And computers won, I would say, very much so, based on this idea that you could capture elements of thought, then encapsulate them and pull them together.

[00:02:00] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: It was sort of an early notion of AI, if you want, the pull of AI, but the pull of just modularism thought and assembling thoughts together. And that was the winning thing. And I went to work on, actually, computer-assisted instruction for a number of years. You may not believe, but as early as 1968, which was the time I'm talking about, there were a large system doing CAI. Professor Soupez at Stanford had some large computer-assisted systems at the time.

[00:02:41] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: What we called CAI in those days was computer-assisted instruction, whereas now in my work at SoundHound, this is conversational AI for the same initials. In any case, so I went to do this at a place called IRIA, which became INRIA, the National Institute for Information and Automation in France. I worked there for four years doing AI, CAI. And then, but the appeal of Stanford was enormous for me. And so I went to Stanford to do a PhD.

[00:03:26] James Parker: Was the appeal because, you know, Stanford is a famous university in America, or is it specifically because that was the place to do that specific work in computing or a bit of everything?

[00:03:44] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: It's sort of in the middle. Stanford was, remember back in those days, computer science wasn't what it is today. It was pretty much a pioneering field. And Stanford was one of the pioneering institutions. I also applied to MIT and UCLA and what was the fourth one and was admitted everywhere. But Stanford was where my heart went. And I had been on the West Coast a few years earlier, visited, you know, San Francisco and the area. I was just fascinated. So I just, yeah, Stanford was my choice.

[00:04:24] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: It was because they had the best computer science programs along with MIT. And you quickly or maybe not so quickly got into working on computer music at Stanford, or was that the, because you said before briefly that that was your sort of alternate love music.

[00:04:48] James Parker: And so how did those converge or what was the relationship between those two in those early days at Stanford?

[00:04:58] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: Yeah, good question. Back in the days of thinking about, it was about electronic music and old computer music, which I did not know about at the time, and I'm speaking 1967, 68. It was just out of an interest in music. But, you know, one thing I always regretted in my life is to not have a formal education in music. And this was something I wanted to do for my own enjoyment, for my own passion even. But I was a computer scientist. I had a very rigorous training in math and science, and was becoming a computer scientist.

[00:05:40] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: The idea of music was not there yet, and it wasn't for a while. What happened was, while I was doing my PhD at Stanford, I took my time and I sampled every topic under the sun in a computer science curriculum. I was involved also in natural language understanding and other things, and very solid training in optimization and so on, like hardcore topics of computer science as opposed to applications. And let's see, I'm losing the thread here. Yes, I wasn't… I wasn't doing anything without music.

[00:06:28] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: I went to be an assistant professor in Berkeley. And I wasn't, how can I say, I had lost my passion for the core CS, you know, ultimate optimization kind of quality, and I started to be attracted to more perceptual fields like visual and auditory, and that was my interest. And this is when, after four years in Berkeley, I left behind a tenure track position to go do research on computer and music. Not in producing computer music, but there's a story on this of how come I went to CCRMA (‘Carma’), and I could get into that story separate stage.

[00:07:21] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: But basically, I went PhD plus four, or almost four, when I left the sort of core computer science track to go into the audio and music area.

[00:07:39] James Parker: I'd love to hear more about how that played out. I mean, yeah, what work were you even doing on audio and music in that period? What work was being done in the field? And then how did that take you to, well, I've been calling it the CCRMA at Stanford, but Carma, as you put it?

[00:08:03] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: Yes. So, yeah, I want to take a deep breath on that one, because now I'm restarting about CCRMA and all the people and then how come I joined in. But basically, if you go back to the founding of CCRMA, that was around 1977. And there were four founders, John Chowning, who had become the director, and two other people, and the fourth was Andy Moore, a student who at the time was completing his PhD in 1977, at the same time I was, and we had known each other at the Stanford AI Lab.

[00:08:53] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: But he wasn't involved with music at the time, at least that I know, and our relationship was based on music, it was based on AI, but we happened to have esteem for each other. And he independently had applied for a grant to the NSF, if you know about the National Science Foundation in the US, a grant to do musical intelligence, which at that point, you know, and when you're a pioneer, you have no limits, you have no boundaries, everything is open field.

[00:09:37] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: And so in that grant, he was going to address everything that could possibly have to do with computers and music or computer analysis of music, and that involved the signal processing, the polyphony, the, you know, musical intelligence in its wider form, and so on and so forth.

[00:09:56] James Parker: So, I know, I know, is that James Moore, is that the same person that I know as James Moore?

[00:10:06] Bernard Mont-Reynaud: Yeah, James Andy Moore. Did you speak with him?