"Archipelago" (1982–83) was one of the first works that Reynolds did that used technology to drastically alter not only the sounds of the composition, but also the process of composing. The impetus was as the title suggests, a chain of islands, an idea which Reynolds elaborated on with a simultaneous theme and variations process. With fifteen themes and their own variations, distributed unevenly over a thirty-two member chamber orchestra, Reynolds needed technology to transform both the timbres and the order of the sounds in ways that live performers could not. This was the first time that Reynolds spent a great deal of time working with computers to transform musical material, along with spatialization, he used a process "in which was trying to take recognizable kernels and weave them into a mosaic of interacting transformations." IRCAM was an extremely fertile environment for composition, allowing the "Archipelago" project to thrive: