Part I Dedication: John Pierce

This part is dedicated to the memory of John Robinson Pierce (1910–2002). John was a dear friend and mentor for many years, beginning in my undergraduate years at Caltech. He gave me a summer job doing lab work on electronic musical instruments, and then on digital codecs that led to my first journal article. He persuaded his colleagues at Bell Labs to take me on as an intern, even after they had objected to my “less than an A in some important subjects.” I owe my knowledge of digital signal processing to this great start with the early researchers and practitioners there. Pierce's work with George Zweig and Richard Lipes at Caltech, after I had left, became one of the most important influences on my thinking in hearing: the wave analysis that led to my filter-cascade approach to modeling the cochlea (Zweig, Lipes, and Pierce, 1976).

Pierce was better known for his work outside of hearing: from his early work in traveling-wave tubes and communication satellites at Bell Labs, his coining of the word transistor, his chief technologist role at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, his science fiction writing under the pen name J. J. Coupling, through his enormous influence on computer music starting at Bell Labs and continuing at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in the 1980s and 1990s. His regular attendance at CCRMA's weekly hearing seminar provided a huge benefit to many of us in the hearing field. He continued to conduct and publish hearing research at Stanford even in his 80s, for example providing clarity on important issues in pitch perception (Pierce, 1991).