For Peter Smaragdis, what’s followed is a career in academia that centered his Artificial Intelligence research on the question: What does it mean to take a stream of sound and then break it down into its individual components? This key interest paced his Masters, PhD and postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It fueled his academic career here and as a research scientist with Adobe Research. It provided opportunity to become an IEEE Fellow in 2015 and the IEEE chair of the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee. And it helped him produce widely published research and more than 40 patents. Through it all, nothing he’s accomplished has been more “mind-bending” than the recent work he completed with a team of engineers to boost the audio quality of director Peter Jackson’s recent documentary titled “The Beatles: Get Back.”