Topics include: his childhood and education in Evansville, Indiana, and college at Evansville College where he studied physics and electrical engineering; graduate school at MIT where he worked with Dick Bolt, Ted Heuter, and Uno Ingard while developing research for his PhD. in 1955; serving on the faculty at University of Minnesota for three years; his year in the UK doing research at Southampton and Manchester where the initial concepts of Statistical Energy Analysis were developed. In 1960, Lyon joined the staff at BBN in Cambridge, Mass. where he stayed until 1970. During that time, he continued development of Statistical Energy Analysis in collaboration with Ira Dyer, Preston Smith, Gideon Maidanik, and others. He also worked on areas related to transportation noise and aerodynamic noise. In 1970 he began his 25-year tenure of research and teaching in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at MIT. During these years, he developed work related to machinery diagnostics, sound quality, and phase analysis. Also during this period he started his consulting company, RH Lyon Corp. In 1995, he retired from MIT and committed his full efforts to the company, which focused on product sound quality.