John Robinson Pierce

John R. Pierce (27 Mar 1910, Des Moines, Iowa — 2 Apr 2002, Sunnyvale, California) was an American engineer, researcher and writer who worked across various fields: radio communication, microwave technology, microtonal music, psychoacoustics, science fiction, etc. He was one of the scholars who independently discovered the non-octave-repeating Bohlen-Pierce scale. Pierce earned all three of his degrees at the California Institute Of Technology: Bachelor's in 1933, Master's in 1934, and Ph.D. in '36. He worked at Bell Laboratories for 35 years, from 1936 to 1971, and then returned to Caltech and taught as a professor of electrical engineering until 1980. John R. Pierce was a chief technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1979 to '82. In 1983, Pierce began his computer music research at Stanford's CCRMA as a visiting professor of music emeritus, working alongside John Chowning and Max Mathews. A year later, Pierce and Mathews designed a series of scales "useful for nontraditional new music" — one of them, named P3579, was equal-tempered using a subset of 13 divisions of the 3:1 octave. Several years afterward, Pierce discovered that German scientist Heinz Bohlen (1935—2016) had already described the same scale back in 1978. Thus, John re-published his findings, renaming it to "Bohlen-Pierce scale." One more scholar predated Pierce in discovering the same scale — co-incidentally, also in 1978, when Kees van Prooijen (b. 1952) came across the identical non-octave-repeating scale based on the tritave and odd harmonics. Pierce wasn't aware of Van Prooijen's invention, most likely, and thus only included Bohlen as the co-inventor.