Pierce earned all three of his degrees at the [l=California Institute Of Technology]: Bachelor's in 1933, Master's in 1934, and Ph.D. in '36. He worked at [url=https://www.discogs.com/label/739826]Bell Laboratories[/url] for 35 years, from 1936 to 1971, and then returned to [l=Caltech] and taught as a professor of electrical engineering until 1980. John R. Pierce was a chief technologist at NASA's [l=Jet Propulsion Laboratory] from 1979 to '82.

In 1983, Pierce began his computer music research at Stanford's [url=https://www.discogs.com/label/319000]CCRMA[/url] 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.