Louis and Bebe Barron were two American composers best known for their early experiments in electronic music and their soundtrack to the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.

History

Married in 1947, the Barrons received a tape recorder as a wedding gift. The 1948 book 'Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine', by mathematician Norbert Wiener, inspired Louis Barron to build electronic circuits, which he manipulated to generate sounds. Bebe's job was to sort through hours and hours of tape and edit as appropriate. Together they manipulated the sounds to create otherworldly and strange electronic soundscapes. This was long before Samplers and Synthesizers were invented and this meant that making electronic music was slow and laborious. The tape had to be physically cut and then stuck back together to edit the finished sounds and compositions together.

The Barrons' music was noticed by the avant-garde scene: In the early 1950s, they worked on a year-long project with composer John Cage. They also scored several short experimental films. The Barrons found that the avant-garde scene did not create many financial rewards. They turned to Hollywood who had already been using electronic instruments such as the theremin in film soundtracks for several years.

Forbidden Planet

Their soundtrack for Forbidden Planet is today recognised as the first entirely electronic score for a film. Erie and sinister, the soundtrack was unlike anything that audiences had heard before. Music historians have often noted how groundbreaking the soundtrack was in the development of electronic music. Not everyone was happy with the score: The American Federation of Musicians prevented them from receiving proper credit for the soundtrack, and in the final cut they were credited as "Sound Tonalities" rather than real musicians. Their names were also left off the film's Oscar nomination. Purists would often quibble as to if the Barron's atonal creations could be classed as "music". This was to cause problems throughout their careers, and they were never to become members of the musicians union and as a result they were never to score another film. Over time the pair did not utilise the new sound-generating technology and as a result some have said that they found theirselves at a creative dead end.

Louis and Bebe Barron divorced in 1970, but they continued to compose until the death of Louis in 1989.

Bebe Barron didn't compose for a decade, but in 1999 she was invited to create a new work at the University of California-Santa Barbara , using the latest sound-generating technology. The work, completed in 2000, is called 'Mixed Emotions'.