Musicians - Louis and Bebe Barron

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	Musicians - Louis and Bebe Barron

Louis (1920–1989) and Bebe Barron (b. 1927) 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 Forbidden Planet.

Early work

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. Bebe studied music with Wallingford Rieger and Henry Cowell.

The couple married in 1948 and moved to New York. Louis' cousin, who was an executive at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), gave the newly weds their first tape recorder as the wedding gift. Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrete.

The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in America was completed by Louis and Bebe in 1950 and was titled Heavenly Menagerie. 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 pasted back together to edit the finished sounds and compositions together.

Production

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.

By following the equations presented in the book, Louis was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator. The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and unpredictable. Some circuits would die, and the Barrons could never reconstruct them back. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.

Most of the production was not scripted or notated in any way. The Barrons didn't even consider the process as music composition themselves. The circuit generated sound was not treated as notes, but instead as 'actors'. In future soundtrack composition, each circuit would be manipulated according to actions of the underlying character in the film.

After recording the sounds, the couple manipulated the material by adding effects, such as reverb and tape delay. They also reversed and changed the speed of certain sounds. The mixdown of multiple sounds was performed with at least three tape recorders. The outputs of two machines would be manually synchronized, and fed into an input of a third one, recording two separate sources simultaneously. The synchronization of future film work was accomplished by two 16mm projectors that were tied into a 16mm tape recorder, and thus ran at the same speed.

While Louis spent most of his time with the circuitry, Bebe did much of the composing and production, and arrangement. She had to sort through hours of tape and edit as appropriate. Together they arranged and manipulated the sounds to create otherworldly and strange electronic soundscapes.

Recording studio

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 very 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 audio book. In June 1949 Anais 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.

For a short time, the Barrons held a monopoly on tape recording equipment. The only other competition in town were the studios owned by Raymond Scott and Eric Siday. The connection through Louis' cousin working at 3M proved to be vital in obtaining batches of early magnetic tape. Due to the lack of competition in the field, and to the surprise of the owners, the recording business was a success.

Most of the equipment in the studio was completely built by the Barrons. One of the home made pieces included a monstrous speaker which could produce very heavy bass. Electronic oscillators that produced sawtooth, sine, and square waves, were also a home built prize possession. They had a filter, a spring reverberator, and several tape recorders. The thriving business brought in the income to purchase some commercial equipment. The Stancil-Hoffmann reel to reel was custom built by the inventor for looping the samples and changing their speed.

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