Louis Barron

We design and construct electronic circuits which function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. [. . .]. In scoring Forbidden Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a "voice". [. . .]. We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.

Bebe Barron remarried in 1975, Louis died in 1989, and Bebe died April 20, 2008.

In 2000, she was invited to create a new work at University of California, Santa Barbara, using the latest in sound generating technology to collect sounds there. From October through early November 2000, she did all the actual composing in Jane Brockman's Santa Monica studio with Brockman serving as recording engineer. The sounds collected at UCSB were imported into Digital Performer on the Mac and organized to create Bebe's final work, Mixed Emotions.

He was born in Minneapolis on April 23, 1920. As a young man, Louis had an affinity for working with a soldering gun and electrical gear. He studied music at the University of Chicago. He died on 1 November 1989 in Los Angeles.

In 1962, the Barrons moved to Los Angeles. Although they divorced in 1970, they continued to compose together until the death of Louis in 1989. Bebe Barron was a founding member and the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States from 1985 to 1987. They awarded her with a lifetime achievement award in 1997.

In 1956 the Barrons composed the very first electronic score for a commercial film – Forbidden Planet, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Barrons approached Dore Schary (MGM's executive producer) at an exhibit of Schary's wife's paintings in 1955. He hired them soon after, when the film was in post-production.

The Barrons' music was noticed by the avant-garde scene. During 1952-53 the studio was used by John Cage for his very first tape work Williams Mix. The Barrons were hired by Cage to be the engineers. They recorded over 600 different sounds, and arranged them with Cage's directions in various ways by splicing the tape together. The four and a half minute piece took over a year to finish. Cage also worked in the Barrons' studio on his Music for Magnetic Tape with other notable composers, including Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor. It was Cage who first encouraged the Barrons to consider their creations "music".

The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in America was completed by Louis and Bebe in 1950 and was titled Heavenly Menagerie. Electronic music composition and production were one and the same, and were slow and laborious. Tape had to be physically cut and pasted together to edit finished sounds and compositions.

Soon after relocation to New York, the Barrons opened a recording studio at 9 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village that catered to the avant-garde scene. This may have been the first electronic music studio in America. At the studio, the Barrons used a tape recorder to record everything and everyone. They recorded Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Aldous Huxley reading their work in a form of early audiobook. In June 1949, Anaïs Nin recorded a full version of House of Incest and four other stories from Under a Glass Bell. These recordings were pressed on red vinyl and released on the Barrons' Contemporary Classics record label under the Sound Portraits series.

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons' composition. The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior apply to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

The couple married in 1947 and moved to New York City. Louis' cousin, who was an executive at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), gave the newlyweds their first tape recorder as a wedding gift. It was early tape recorder technology that used magnetized plastic tape. Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrète.

Bebe Barron ((1925-06-16 ) June 16, 1925 – April 20, 2008(2008-04-20) (aged 82)) and Louis Barron ((1920-04-23 ) April 23, 1920 – November 1, 1989(1989-11-01) (aged 69)) were two American pioneers in the field of electronic music. They are credited with writing the first electronic music for magnetic tape, and the first entirely electronic film score for the MGM movie Forbidden Planet (1956).