Louis & Bebe

These two are pioneers in Electronic Music. They were the 1^st to make electronic music on magnetic tape, which was Heavenly Menagerie. But what’s more amazing is that they are the first to do an entire film score electronic for the movie Forbidden Planet in 1956. They created alien like sounds, scary environments, and interesting ambiences. The circuitry that was used for this project was home made and built by Louis and Bebe themselves. The equipment would overheat at times and cause of consistent use, a lot of sounds were not about to be reproduced.

The interesting thing about it was that they recorded piece by piece and it was mixed down from a tape recorder feeding into another recorder, it was a unique process. The music and effects completely awed the audience. They had their soundtrack distributed by GNP; who is a company known for producing and marketing science fiction film soundtracks.

John Cage worked with them and told them that what they were doing was electronic music. They didn’t even realize they were making a genre; they were just making sounds and experimenting.

What is great is that Modern Digital Technology is now imitating their sound with the old analog circuits. In 2000, Bebe Barron was invited to create a new work at University of California, Santa Barbara, using the latest sound generating technology to collect sounds there. In November 2000, Bebe did all the composing on Jane Brockman’s studio. The sounds collected at UCSB were imported into Digital Performer on the Mac and Bebe created her final project, Mixed Emotions.

What is amazing about them is after Forbidden Planets; they didn’t score another film about that. Their old recording and mixing techniques were innovating. People today use their circuits to use their old rich analog sound.