At 16, he played in a surf music band, sometimes backing artists such as The Lovin' Spoonful and Paul Revere & the Raiders.
By 1977, Stearns had formed a small independent record label (Continuum Montage) with Susan Harper and a close friend and investor, David Breuer.
In the same years, Stearns started out playing with Fred Stofflet a percussionist, then with Don Preston, the former keyboardist for The Mothers of Invention.
After that, Stearns, Stofflet and Craig Hundley, a friend of Gary David's, started a free jazz group called "Alivity".
In the same period, Stearns started working with Craig Huxley scoring movies and developed a friendship with Stephen Hill.
In the next years, Stearns worked again with Ron Fricke, scoring Baraka, his best-known composition, and released several albums, working with Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny and/or Ron Sunsinger (1989 : Desert Solitaire, 1994 : Singing Stones and Kiva) or alone (1993 : Sacred Sites, 1995 : The Lost World).
In 2000 and 2001, Stearns, now established in Santa Fe, New Mexico, released several albums on his own label Earth Turtle : Within, The Middle of Time, Spirits of the Voyage, The Storm, and Sorcerer.