Louis and Bebe Barron: Forbidden Planet at the Dawn of Electronic Music

Editor’s Note: This was originally published in May 2012. In honor of Women’s History Month, 5 Mag has decided to republish a substantially revised version of this piece to highlight the (far too often overlooked) role of Bebe Barron in the evolution of electronic music.

I’m holding in my hands one of the most remarkable artistic achievements of the Twentieth Century. That’s a big claim to make for the soundtrack of a 1956 MGM film, but there’s never been a soundtrack quite like Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet.

Made when Robert Arthur Moog’s devices were simply electronic kits (and 11 years prior to his namesake’s coming out party at the Monterrey Pop Festival), the Barrons’ Forbidden Planet is synth music without synths, electronic music that is more “electronic” than “music” and yet immediately identifiable as the precursor to the beats and tones that we know today.

Unable to reproduce or even classify the sounds they were making, Louis and Bebe Barron constructed their ethereal and demonic soundtrack through custom built circuits, most of which died immediately after use. In an interview with composer Jane Brockman, Bebe Barron recalled that

Louis would invent a circuit and put it together. Then we would activate the circuit: it would come to life, and we would amplify it and start to tape it. And it would produce a burst of the most glorious kind of energy and electronic activity.

That would level out a little bit – go on along a plateau. And then, in a moment of glory, it died – the electronic explanation would be that it overloaded in some way. But you could hear it climaxing, and the thing then would just give out, and run down to zero.

We could never get them to start up again after they died – each had a lifespan of its own.

This is rather high art for a science fiction film from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and it was a roundabout way that the Barrons got there. They met in Minneapolis, recorded with avant garde composer John Cage in New York (their work surfaces in his Williams Mix, recorded at their studio in 1952 to 1953, and his Music for Magnetic Tape) and opened a studio in Greenwich Village, New York. They weren’t the only people experimenting with tape recorders (though it seems likely that they invented the tape loop, and probably the “audio book” as well via their work with Anais Nin), but other experiments at the time often involved manipulating organic sounds. Louis and Bebe Barron had a deep appreciation for the “synthetic purity” of their creations.

When a couple works together, it often means disregarding the woman’s output as merely someone in a supporting role – a “secretary” or an “assistant” to her overworked husband. This rarely applies in reverse: men who work with their wives hardly ever shed their masculinity, or their “genius.”

“If our circuits started doing things that even remotely resembled existing intruments,” Bebe Barron told Brockman, “we just tossed it out. We didn’t even want to sound like any existing instrument. It was totally our realm.”

The Barrons obtained MGM’s blessing to work on Forbidden Planet (something of a nightmare project, with scores of contributors moving in and out of the production) after crashing a party attended by MGM producer Dore Schary in Greenwich Village. They were originally to compose some 20 minutes of the film’s soundtrack or sound effects – another avant garde composer, Harry Partch, was one of those attached to the project at one point – but eventually were given the entire show.

The ambient hum of an engine or the roar of a Tie-Fighter? Louis and Bebe Barron did that.

Their creation was quite unlike anything heard before 1956 – a “soundtrack” without songs, blurring the line entirely between what we know as a “film score” and “sound effects” and possibly inventing – and certainly advancing – the notion of “sound design.” Hollywood’s first tentative steps with electronic instruments of any sort had been limited to the use of the Theremin, but Bebe Barron estimated that 95% of the sound in Forbidden Planet had been created using the Barrons’ homemade circuits, built in a space that must have resembled a factory more than a recording studio.

Vacuum tubes were our main components. There were also resistors, capacitors, inductors and semiconductors… Reverberation was also very big with us. We invented our own since there wasn’t anything else. We used acoustical reverb and plate reverb. When we recorded sound at 15 lps with accoustical reverberation and then slowed it down a couple of generations, the reverb would give it a rhythmic beat – and that was extremely useful. It was one of the very few ways we had for getting a regular rhythmic beat.

When released to theaters, Forbidden Planet dazzled audiences, leading to numerous (and possibly apocryphal) tales of standing ovations in response to the special effects. What is not up for debate is the appalling ignorance of the establishment to just what Louis and Bebe Barron had accomplished.

As the story goes, the Musicians Union objected to the score being classified as a soundtrack, either because Louis and Bebe Barron did not belong to the union and possibly because as electronic musicians they wouldn’t be able to. The American Federation of Musicians bristled at even the use of the word “music” in the credits. Infamously, this strange creation was credited in the film’s titles with the awkward tag of “electronic tonalities” – something different but suspiciously inferior to “music.”

Because of these complications, this most remarkable film score was never considered for the Academy Award for either score or special effects. (Until 1963, the Academy did not distinguish between visual and sound effects. Arnold Gillespie, Irving Ries and Wesley C. Miller, who worked on Forbidden Planet, were nominated for special effects, but not Louis and Bebe Barron; the award wound up going to The Ten Commandments.)

MGM never released the Barrons’ Forbidden Planet soundtrack, and in the era before video players, the only way to hear it was to see the film itself. Louis and Bebe Barron released their “electronic tonalities” in 1976 for the first time, and it’s been reissued in a handsome, limited edition vinyl package from re-issue house PoppyDisc. Remastered by Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub and Jonny, the album also features interesting liner notes by John Cavanagh.

But far more interesting is Jane Brockman’s 1992 interview with Bebe Barron and her loving memorial to Barron after her passing in 2008. An interesting footnote is Bebe’s attitude toward the rise of synthesizers and then their eclipse by DAWs:

One day (ca. 1997?), Bebe decided she wanted to compose again. Through the Recycler, we found a used Roland JD-800 synthesizer (which emulated analog sounds), and I loaned her my old Mac for sequencing, and Tascam 388 (8 channel reel-to-reel tape recorder and mixer) – but they sat unused in her living room for ca. five years until Bebe and Leonard sold their Beverly Hills home. Digital sounds weren’t complex enough for her taste.

A few years later, as composer-in-residence at Cal-Santa Barbara, Bebe Barron did create her final work, using computers to “mimic the analog sounds she had always loved.” Titled “Mixed Emotions”, Brockman has made it available on YouTube – and it actually does sound quite close to those pulsing, throbbing and then dying circuits of Forbidden Planet’s monsters and spacecraft:

Bebe and Louis Barron were a couple, and also a team. When the personal union ended, the collaboration did not. These two figures are so symbiotic that the Barrons are among the few artists I can think of that have a shared Wikipedia article. As is the prejudice of our society, this often means disregarding the woman’s output as merely someone in a supporting role – a “secretary” or an “assistant” to her overworked husband. This rarely applies in reverse: men who work with their wives hardly ever shed their “masculinity” – or their genius.

In reality, Bebe Barron was a serious composer. Jane Brockman (if you can’t tell by the copious linkage, you really owe it to yourself to read her piece) describes the impact of the Louis and Bebe Barron in particular with much more authority than I have:

Prior to their work, music was always made by instruments; electric circuits were… well, circuits. And their sounds originated as dirty noise – it was Bebe, who developed the ability to know which sounds could be made into something musically useful. Though experiments were going on in Europe, the Barrons had no knowledge of these at the time. The creative leap it took to conceive of an artform made through these means, and invent the methods to do it, is simply astonishing. John Cage, working with them in their studio on his “Williams Mix,” convinced the Barrons that their early efforts really were music.