Bernardo Chazelle is a Princeton computer scientist and a lover of the music of Bach.

He's written, Bach didn't regard himself as an artist but as a scientist, a cosmologist

of music.

And after hearing this conversation, you may never listen to any piece of music, whether

Bach or Jay-Z, in quite the same way again.

And I find very strange is this.

I mean, all Bach is doing and sending a bunch of sound waves going crashing into your ear.

So in your brain, there must be this reservoir of beauty which most often is untapped.

But if you can't find it with a light spotlight, then you discover this amazing, you know,

consonances or distances, this amazing narrative story.

Inside you, there's this enormous gold mine that can be revealed.

I'm Christopher Tippet and this is on being.

My conversation with Bernardo Chazelle was part of Bach's stock, WQXR New York's Month Long Festival,

celebrating the music life and times of Bach.

We spoke before a live audience at the Jerome L. Green Performance Space in Lower Manhattan.

Hello, good evening.

It's so great to be here in the Green Space.

And I'll just want to start by introducing Bernardo Chazelle, who is Eugene Higgins,

professor of computer science at Princeton University, with a specialty in computational geometry.

He works with algorithms of field he believes to hold promise of a scientific revolution.

A key theme of his blog is also his love of music.

He writes in a most original way about Eric Clapton and Eminem and Thelonius Monk and Amy Winehouse

...