Several years after their visit to La Jolla, Will Ogdon, then UCSD's Department of Music chair, invited the Reynolds back to the area, offering Reynolds a position as an associate professor. He began work on establishing what became the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research in 1971, an organized research unit that later evolved into the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. As was the case with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the initial funding for CME came from the Rockefeller Foundation.