News

John Pierce (1910–2002)

John Robinson Pierce, a celebrated electrical engineer who oversaw and promoted seminal research in computer music, passed away in Sunnyvale, California on 2 April 2002, at age 92. He died of complications from pneumonia, having been in declining health for a number of years. Historians will undoubtedly consider his most significant impact on computer music to be his encouragement of Max Mathews's pioneering but unofficial work on digital music synthesis at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Mr. Pierce was an executive director. However, Mr. Pierce himself made numerous contributions to the field, including authoring a popular book on musical acoustics (with a slant toward computer music) and conducting or co-authoring various experiments in musical acoustics and psychoacoustics.

John Pierce is best known for his extramusical accomplishments. He coined the term "transistor" for the device invented by his colleagues at Bell Labs, and he laid the basis for the first telecommunications satellites. His publications and leadership resulted in Echo I, a 100-foot balloon satellite launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1960. Its success led to the launching in 1962 of the first commercial telecommunications satellite, Telstar I, built by a team John Pierce directed at Bell Labs. He also improved traveling-wave tubes (see Figure 1), invented the Pierce electron gun (a vacuum tube used in satellites and linear accelerators), and co-developed the low-voltage reflex klystron oscillator, which is used in radar receivers.

An avid writer, he published numerous technical books, in addition to science-fiction stories mostly written under the pseudonym J. J. Coupling. He authored or co-authored at least 20 books and over 300 papers; and more than 90 patents were issued in his name. His most important books related to music are his text The Science of Musical Sound (Scientific American Books, 1983; reissued in paperback by W. H. Freeman and Co., 1992) and the anthology Current Directions in Computer Music Research (co-edited with Max Mathews, MIT Press, 1991).

Born 27 March 1910 in Iowa, John Pierce grew up in California and received his PhD in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in 1936, after which he worked at Bell Labs until 1971. He was then a professor of engineering at CalTech and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the 1980s, Mr. Pierce and Mr. Mathews were invited to join the faculty at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), directed by John Chowning. Mr. Pierce was given the unusual title of Visiting Professor of Music, Emeritus.

Besides promoting Max Mathews's research at Bell Labs, John Pierce influenced many others in the field. The distinguished engineer Carver Mead took up computer music research for a period after Mr. Pierce introduced him to the area. And it was John Pierce who, on learning about Mr. Chowning's FM sound-synthesis algorithm, succinctly issued two words of advice to him that ultimately affected the music industry: "Patent it!" Mr. Pierce also helped Stanford University win a large grant from the Systems Development Foundation to support the work at CCRMA.

Although John Pierce was by no means a composer (having what he referred to as "an unreciprocated love of music"), he experimented with creating some pieces of music to illustrate theoretical principles. In 1949, inspired by Claude Shannon's work on information theory, Mr. Pierce and his assistant at Bell Labs, Elizabeth Moorer, composed three short hymn-like pieces using specially made dice and a random-number table. Later, he generated some musical examples using sound synthesis at Bell Labs: Stochata (1959), Variations in Timbre and Attack (1961), Sea Sounds (1963), and Eight-Tone Canon (1966). These synthesized pieces were published on the compact disc Computer Music Currents 13 (Wergo WE152–3, available from www.cdemusic.org). (Decca issued two earlier recordings on vinyl: "Music from Mathematics" and "The Voice of the Computer," which included Mr. Pierce's work.)

In his later years, he was particularly interested in what he eventually termed "the Bohlen-Pierce scale" (after learning of its earlier description by Heinz Bohlen): a division of the frequency ratio 3:1 into 13 equal parts...