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Louis Barron: Pioneer of Tube Audio Effects

‘Forbidden Planet’ was one of my early experiences of science fiction. As a nerdy kid into science, space, and raised in the outer limits of nowhere, a.k.a. midlands of England, this movie was a lifeline and ultimately a powerful prime mover, pulling me into the field of electronic engineering. The script, staggering visuals and otherworldly sound effects still hold their own in the light of movies made today some sixty years on. This article tells of how Louis Barron, along with co-composer Bebe Barron, exploited, more accurately “circuit hacked”, the technology of the time—tubes and tapes—to create a soundscore that was out of this world.

An Early Electronic Music Studio

Turn the clock back six decades to an era where the electronic sound synthesiser was still just the barest glimmer of an orange neon glow in Robert Moog’s eyes. When digital audio recording/sampling was some young, starry-eyed engineer’s far-flung dream; the realm of science fiction. It’s easy to imagine this period as a ‘dark ages’ for electronic music. However, a lively avant-garde music scene was in full swing in the late 1940s and was being fueled by the latest developments in vacuum tube electronics and new innovations in magnetic tape recording.

A handful of pioneering composers, such as Louis and Bebe Barron, freely embraced this modern state-of-the-art electronic technology and began probing the sonic limits in search of new and “interesting” sounds with little, or no, regard for musical tradition or orthodoxy. Although Louis studied a music degree at University of Chicago he also possessed a flair for tinkering with electronics. This enabled him to construct much of the equipment in their Greenwich Village studio, which looked more like an old radio repair shop than a recording studio. However, much of their equipment wasn’t old at the time; it was brand-new, it was ultramodern, the latest thing. Bebe’s friend, American writer Anaïs Nin, wrote in her diary of her experiences there,

Louis Barron pictured with one of his tube effects circuits [photo taken in his electronic music studio at 9 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village on January 1st 1956 by Walter Daran].

“The front room of their apartment on Eight Street is completely filled with equipment. It is a jungle of electronic instruments, knobs, wires, as complex as the control panel of an airplane.” — Anaïs Nin

During 1956, whilst Louis and Bebe were at work on the soundscore for sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet, MGM sent photographer Walter Daran over to visit their Greenwich Village apartment to take a few shots of the couple in their studio. The result was a set of beautifully detailed, high-quality black and white photographs [taken using Kodak ‘Tri-X’ 36-exposure 35mm black & white negative film] recording a significant moment in the history of experimental electronic music. Daran’s photographs are a rare and precious thing—it’s incredible that these images exist, that MGM had the foresight to capture the moment on film—as preserved within each frame there exists vital insight regarding Louis and Bebe’s unique, creative musical process.

In another of Daran’s photos Louis’ main tool of the trade, his Precise model ‘300’ oscilloscope, can clearly be seen in the foreground. An oscilloscope is effectively an engineer’s “eyes”, allowing them to see exactly what’s happening to the electronic signals within a circuit. Incidentally, the model ‘300’ ‘scope first made an appearance in the June edition of ‘Radio Electronics’ in 1953, just a couple of years before the photo was taken. The ‘scope was available in kit or “wired” (factory built) form and manufactured by Precise Development Corp, Oceanside, New York. On top of the ‘scope is a box with slider controls on its front panel—could it possibly be a homemade filter; a very early 6-band graphic equaliser?

“Everything was built by hand, by Louis primarily… he was a self-taught electronics engineer. He dared to use it in weird ways that has never been used before.” — Bebe Barron

In Louis’ hands is one of his hand-built audio effects circuits. On his workbench, between him and the ‘scope, is an offcut of perforated ‘Masonite’ (hardboard). The holes in the Masonite are being used to anchor electronic components creating what appears to be a miniature Manhattan skyline: a scale model city where vacuum tubes tower above a fantastically tangled network of high voltage wires and resistors below. Louis is sat in front of a 19″ rack tower containing tube power amplifiers, a Precise ‘909’ vacuum tube voltmeter, more homemade/modified tube gear including saw-tooth, sine, and square-wave oscillators and surely their homemade spring-reverb unit is in there somewhere too—Louis and Bebe relied on reverb and delay effects heavily in their music. The musical function of the V-shaped, ‘rabbit-ear’ antenna perched right on top of the rack tower is, unknown…

The impressive, mammoth-sized box behind him is another homemade creation, this time a 12″ paper-cone loudspeaker housed in what appears to be an old tea chest; effectively an infinite baffle cabinet capable of reproducing very low, bass frequencies, a.k.a. a subwoofer.

“We built this monstrous big speaker and it sounded wonderful. It had a very heavy bass, which I always loved. That was the speaker we worked with. I believe it was one of those big old theater speakers.” — Bebe Barron

Towards Bebe’s left, closer in the frame, is a sloping desk housing rack-mount equipment with large bakelite RCA knobs; like the ones found on vintage radio broadcast equipment, such as the Collins 212A broadcast mixing console. Above it is a patch bay of jack sockets. It’s difficult to say for sure what this equipment is from any of Daran’s photos, however it possesses two rows of of five RCA knobs and somewhat resembles the amplifier section of a Presto PT-900 tape recorder.

The Barrons owned several reel-to-reel tape recorders, however only the Stancil-Hoffman tape machine, standing vertically against the rear wall, is clearly visible in Daran’s photo. Bebe, obviously posing for the shot, appears to be either fast-forwarding or rewinding the tape spools loaded on the machine. Behind her, to the right of the Stancil-Hoffman, hidden in the shadows, is a third machine: their Ampex model 200. This marvellous example of American engineering also doubles as a desk for splicing tape and editing tapes for making loops. The small, portable meter on top must have been for monitoring recording levels.

Ampex magnetic tape recorder — The Barrons owned an 'Ampex' ¼” reel-to-reel magnetic plastic tape recorder—far superior to the paper tape machines of the time.

Next to the rack tower is a modest-sized cupboard and drawers, on top of which sits an electrical appliance. Gracing its pale-coloured front-panel—which appears to have been partially removed—are six Daka-ware chicken-head knobs, radio push buttons, a cluster of jack sockets and a 6E5 ‘magic eye’ tuning level indicator; and above, there’s what looks like a turntable with loose papers, a notebook and plastic tape spools piled on top if it. This is obviously audio equipment, but what? Could this electro-mechanical apparatus be a radiogram? With jack sockets? Or might it be a hacked “Mail-A-Voice” magnetic disc recorder? But for what purpose?

On the far right is the 16mm Ampro Premier 20 projector Louis and Bebe used to screen the work print of Forbidden Planet for music timings. Against the walls are several steel shelves containing 10½” magnetic tape reels, 16mm film-cans, technical manuals, tools, boxes of electronic and electro-mechanical components—the Barrons had put together one of the first electronic music studios in America. This floor plan shows the how they organised all their electronic music equipment in their apartment on 9 West 8th Street, New York.

To summarise, the Barrons studio was raggle-taggle mishmash of gleaming, state-of-the-art recording equipment, like the Ampex 200, and homemade circuits made of reused, hand-me-down resistors and capacitors held together with paperclips and prayers; an experimental, mad scientist’s laboratory, where every desk, chair, tape machine—in short, every horizontal flat surface—was littered with Louis’ ever-growing, sprawling network of high-voltage, vacuum tube inventions. Bebe describes the crazily cramped and impossibly busy space,

“It was like a nightmare… our studio. Because everything was held together with paperclips.”— Bebe Barron

That small apartment room was jam-packed with tube gadgets of one kind or another, and tubes get hot, especially the big ones. For example, power tubes found in amplifiers and the voltage regulated power supplies of tape recorders. The clue’s in their English name: “Thermionic Valves”. A tube works on the principle of Thermionic emission, where electrons are effectively boiled off a heated material (a.k.a. the “cathode“); simply put, a tube needs to be hot in order to function. Even low power “receiving tubes“, like the ones Louis utilised in his circuits, become warm and radiate a small, but significant, amount of heat. And consider also the countless dozens of receiving tubes baking away within the electronic innards of preamp and bias circuits of their tape machines, mixers, oscillators, oscilloscope and other test equipment within the studio.

Glowing vacuum tubes — Vacuum tubes radiate light and waste heat. [Photo courtesy of Kevin Davis]

All that heat builds up. With all those glowing glass bottles dumping their excess heat into the confined space it became unbearably hot, especially in summer. Further, exacerbated by the fact there was no air conditioning in their small apartment.

“Oh god, I tell you the heat was unbelievable!” — Bebe Barron

Magnetic Monopoly

The Barrons' first tape machine: The Brush 'Soundmirror' tape recorder.

At this time magnetic tape recording/playback technology was not widely available to the consumer market. However, the Barrons had connections. Louis’ cousin worked as an executive at Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) and in 1948 gave them a Brush ‘Soundmirror’ “Magnetic Ribbon” tape recorder as a wedding gift. The Magnetic Ribbon was made of paper tape coated with a thin layer of iron oxide dust on one side. It was considerably easier to handle and store than the old steel recording wire. Further, it could be erased and rerecorded over. This made the Soundmirror easy for the novice to operate, but there was a small drawback; the recorder was an early example of a domestic machine—quite possibly a model BK-455P (portable), or a closely related Brush machine, such as the BK-443P—with no facility to rewind tapes. To rewind they had to swap the reels around and fast-forward the tape, where it would then play the recorded audio backwards at high speed. Louis immediately saw the creative potential for making sound effects.

Magnetic ribbon paper tape came and went, and as the 1940s drew to a close, it was superseded by a more durable plastic tape. Louis, ever curious about the latest technological toys that science had to offer, acquired another machine that could use the new tape. The Barrons next tape recorder was an AEG ‘Magnetophon’ K4. The K4 was a professional hi-fidelity German-made machine, beautifully engineered and capable of exceptionally high quality sound reproduction. Incidentally, the K4—well, a “reverse engineered” and modified version of it, which became the Ampex model 200—first found use in the US just a few years earlier to prerecord Bing Crosby’s radio show, the Philco Radio Hour.

The new plastic tape media made it possible to approach music composition in an entirely new way. It permitted Bebe to record and archive the sounds generated by Louis’s circuits and build a working library. Unlike recording wire, which was prone to becoming tangled, snarled up and breaking, plastic tape played more nicely, and it could be easily “manipulated” to serve Bebe’s higher creative purposes. It was easier to handle and splice without creating audio “dropouts” in the recorded material. Bebe could ‘post-process’ recorded material on tape by adding reverb, delay or reversing and varying the speed of certain sounds. She could “cut” and “edit” short fragments of tape with unprecedented precision to isolate brief, “interesting” bursts of sound. The tape fragments could be rearranged, spliced back together and looped to create sustain or rhythm with little or no dependency on the live performance abilities of the musician (in this particular case, a wailing electronic circuit).

Webster-Chicago recording wire — Difficulties encountered with breaks, tangles and splicing steel recording wire limited its creative possibilities.

Multi-tracking was performed with three tape machines, where the outputs of two machines were manually synchronised and fed into an input of the third, recording two separate sources simultaneously. Hand syncing and speed fluctuations between the machines pretty much ensured there was always a time lag between the two tracks being mixed, but this didn’t matter, in fact it helped to add phase blurring, vibrato and echo effects, giving the final mixed-down track a deep, spacious vibe.

“She [Bebe] could remember where to go for a certain feeling in a sound.” — Louis Barron

Meticulously hand-building circuits, recording them and further manipulating the material by adding reverb, delay, reversing, etc. was a repetitive, time-consuming and laborious process. Bebe would spend countless hours listening, days even, searching through hundreds of raw tape clips in search of an “interesting” sound they’d recorded from one of Louis’s circuits. In her own words it was, “A terrible job.” [National Public Radio, 2005] But Louis and Bebe could see beyond the immediate tedium and confines of their small Greenwich Village studio. Undeterred, they pushed on in their sonic explorations to sculpt stark, unearthly soundscapes with a bleak beauty and finesse not found in the work of their contemporaries.

'Western' panel mount Vu meter — Vu meter on the Barrons Stancil-Hoffman tape machine; custom-built for creating tape loop effects.

Their thriving studio business brought in enough income to acquire additional equipment, including a Stancil-Hoffman tape recorder custom-built to Louis’ specification. Back in the day, Stancil-Hoffman had a reputation for producing reliable, high-quality, specialist machines for the professional market and US armed forces and Louis thought very highly of them. The Barrons Stancil-Hoffman was a two-motor ¼” mono reel-to-reel tape machine where the tapes were aligned vertically on the transport. The machine was also modified with a voltage controller to vary the capstan speed; specially designed to enable Bebe to shift the pitch and give her more control when playing tape loops. The machine is one of Stancil-Hoffman’s earliest examples of a portable commercial tape machine. The variable speed feature was later incorporated as a one knob editing control (the ‘Vari-trol’) on Stancil-Hoffman’s new ‘R-5‘ machine. The Vari-trol enabled the user to wind, or rewind, tape at continuous speeds and make it move in either direction at full or playing speeds, or stop the tape instantly—perfect for the budding young composer wanting to experiment with avant-garde reverse and pitch variation effects.

“The way the tapes were aligned vertically on the transport, it just kind of looked at you and said ‘Hey, I’m perfect for a tape loop.'” — Bebe Barron

Using their newly acquired modern tape machines, the couple delved deeper into the study of musique concrète, recording everything and everyone. For a brief time Louis and Bebe held a monopoly on state-of-the-art magnetic tape recording equipment. And, their connection through Louis’ cousin at 3M—the first American company to successfully coat plastic (acetate) tape with an emulsion of iron oxide—ensured they had a plentiful supply of magnetic tape for their projects. This established the Barrons as a successful working music studio, recording and releasing spoken word discs of Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, and Aldous Huxley in a series called Sound Portraits.

'Scotch' magnetic recording tap — 3M 'Scotch' ¼” plastic magnetic tape: This new recording medium opened-up possibilities for creating electronic sound effects.

Self-Destructing Tube Circuits

Electronic components — Resistors, capacitors and vacuum tubes: The building blocks that make electronic life possible.

Louis’ vacuum tube circuits can be heard all over Forbidden Planet’s soundscore. They play a leading role, especially during the movie’s more intense, climatic moments. For instance, when the invisible Id monster rips through United Planets Cruiser C-57D’s force-field, or when melting its way through the 26″ thick, solid Krell metal door. It’s in these moments you can hear Louis’ circuits wailing, screaming and dying. They sound quite extraordinary, visceral, even alive; like nothing heard before, or since. But the circuits didn’t just do violence and anger. They could also generate soft, subtle, pulsating tones, which, after the addition of reverb and delay effects, create dark haunting, dark ambient soundscapes that permeate the entire movie. But how did Louis create such electronic life?

“It was difficult [laughs]. It was a very hard way to make music. It took us forever to do anything.” — Bebe Barron

It can’t have been easy. Bear in mind Louis and Bebe lived and worked in mid-twentieth century. There were no mobile phones, personal computers or world wide web; a technologically deficient era, or as Spock dryly put it in Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, “a zinc-plated vacuum tube culture”. With no internet there was only sparse written literature available for electronics experimenters. Louis was a keen reader of electronics magazines, such as Radio-Craft (later Radio-Electronics). These magazines contained technical articles, tips and the latest news on developments within the electronics industry. Radio-Craft was an invaluable source of ideas and, perhaps more importantly, a vital link to vendors supplying electronic components—capacitors, resistors, diodes and tubes—and kits for building test equipment, such as the Precise ‘300’ oscilloscope .

Battle with the Invisible Monster (Forbidden Planet)

Electronics and music weren’t Louis’ only interests. Curious about the new, the unknown and the abstract, his interests ranged far and wide: shortwave radio, psychology, social science, computing, philosophy and, even mathematics. He became fascinated with mathematician Norbert Wiener’s recently published book, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in The Animal and The Machine. He read Wiener’s book, over and over, and discovered something within its pages; something he could use; something that would enable him to create circuits that did something other than simply amplify or oscillate.

The text is a dry read. Some chapters are purely mathematical, reading like an ancient alien language; utterly incomprehensible to the layman. But, scattered sparsely amongst all the impenetrable runes are signs; signs an engineer can interpret. For example, there are references regarding the practical application of vacuum tubes to mimic or replicate systems found within living organisms. On page 153, Wiener states,

“It is perfectly possible, for example, to cause any message going into storage to change in a permanent or semi-permanent way the grid bias of one or of a number of vacuum tubes, and thus alter the numerical value of the summation of impulses which will make the tube or tubes fire” — Norbert Wiener

What Wiener is describing here is an attempt to model the behavior of a single neuron—one of countless nerve cells that make up the human brain—using vacuum tubes.

'Cybernetics or Control and Communication in The Animal and The Machine' by Norbert Wiener. — 'Cybernetics' by Norbert Wiener: The maths behind 'Forbidden Planet's' electronic soundscore.

An entire chapter of the book is devoted to the topic of feedback and oscillation and describes a non-linear, oscillator more commonly known as a relaxation oscillator. This type of circuit is used to generate the sawtooth waveform that drives the raster scan in old cathode ray tube television sets, creating the picture. Relaxation oscillators were constructed from gas filled—usually neon or argon—“regulator” tubes or thyratron tubes containing hydrogen. Louis took the principles and equations described in the text and embodied them in hybrid oscillator, ring modulator and ‘clipping’ circuits. However, his method was not to think in terms of conventional analogue signal processes, such as oscillation, filtering, distortion, etc, but to treat the circuit as a living organism going through a lifecycle.

The circuits were “Heath Robinson” affairs, temporary lash-ups that took days, even weeks to construct and debug; their operational life expectancy was short in comparison, being measured in minutes or at best a few hours. By manually adjusting an applied voltage, or a variable resistor or capacitor, Louis could coerce a circuit into electronic life and then step back to give it space to perform. Electrons flowed and danced within the circuits’ wires and it would begin to “sing”. For a brief time it would emit a cacophony of otherworldly bleeps, blurps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums, wails or screeches before expiring and falling into silence, forever. Louis’ creations were made to bring something unique into our world; they existed and survived only long enough to generate some novel, and undoubtedly chaotic sound or, as Bebe put it,

“It just sounded like dirty noise” — Bebe Barron

After that, when their short life was over, the circuits were dismembered and cannibalised for spare parts.

Vacuum tube technology is what made Louis’ circuit creations realisable. In the 1986 Keyboard Magazine interview he explains,

“Tubes are forgiving. The grid of a power tube may be expected to take one or two volts. If you accidentally touch it with 300 volts, it’ll heat up, it’ll get red in the face. Take the voltage away and it’ll cool down, ready to do its normal thing. A transistor would blow in a fraction of a millisecond. And even if they don’t cost much, they’re a damn nuisance to keep changing.” — Louis Barron

Louis makes an excellent point: Transistors are fantastically fragile devices. Engineers ironically and jokingly refer to them as, “our old friend, the trusty three-legged fuse.”—FETs (Field Effect Transistors) blow at the slightest excuse, sometimes even just by looking at them. Louis adds, in order to create electronic life, “you have to be free to abuse the circuit.” That said, he pushed his electronic creations to their limits, often overloading and destroying them in the process, like a proper mad scientist!

A Quick Recipe for Electronic Life

Step One: Generate an audio waveform. A tube phase-shift oscillator will produce a sine wave, however a sawtooth wave from neon tube relaxation oscillator contains more harmonic content and sound more ‘edgy’. Further, the neon tube strikes erratically introducing some unpredictable frequency instability.

Step Two: Add texture and colouration, a.k.a. non-linearity, by adding a “hot” or “cold” biased tube gain after the oscilator. Or add “clipping” diodes to cut the peaks off the signal and add harmonics. If you want to really mess with the signal use a diode ring modulator to multiply your oscillator output with a second oscillator.

Step Three: Dynamically and randomly alter voltage levels from your oscillators or swap out fixed resistors with variable potentiometers. See if you can kick the circuit into a chaotic state where it’s doing its own thing.

TONE TIP! Spice things up a little with a few duff components. For example, an adversely microphonic tube can create unstable positive feedback loops; over-voltage resistors or capacitors will crackle and fry; and to get things really cooking you could try constructing the circuit point-to-point on the workbench with paper clips—it’s sure to do something interesting!

So far we’ve discussed the vintage technology and the system of thinking behind Louis’ work, but what about his vacuum tube creations? Does anything remain of the tube circuits that created the dark, dreamlike soundscapes of Forbidden Planet or the anguished, dying screams of the Id monster? According to Bebe,

“When Louis died [in 1989] he took the ‘key’ to the circuits with him.” — Bebe Barron

Is that true? Did he take his secrets with him? I’m not so sure. After all, mad scientists keep journals, or at the very least, notes scrawled on scraps of lose paper, beer mats, anything that comes to hand really—never met an scientist or engineer that didn’t. As it turns out, Louis did too.

louis_barron_ring_modulator_circuit_small — Louis catalogued his circuit designs on thousands of note cards like the one shown above.

He kept a record of his circuits on thousands of small note cards like the one pictured on the left—what an index system. The circuit is a modified diode ring modulator, followed by a difference amplifier and diode “clamp” circuit. Louis added a few “tweaks” that are not straight out of the textbook—see the additional diodes in the ring circuit? There’s little doubt these mods were added in an attempt to generate some specific sound effect—a dream or idea in his subconscious mind—but without being able to talk to him in person, or see written notes, it’s impossible to know for sure what sound he was in search of. Perhaps, Louis did keep a notebook or diary detailing his thought processes and investigations into the unknown world of cybernetically generated music. Perhaps it’s visible in one of Daran’s photos, somewhere amongst the sea of electronic paraphernalia in the Barrons studio. And, perhaps that notebook survives to this day, and is waiting patiently for someone to find it, open its pages and discover the secrets within…

Forbidden Music

During the early 1950s they and their studio were hired by John Cage for his first tape work, Williams Mix. Cage essentially utilised the Barrons as sound engineers to record over six-hundred different sounds and then cut the recordings up into tiny fragments, rearrange them and splice them back together to create a four and a half minute piece. They moved on to create electronic music for several short experimental films, scoring three of Ian Hugo’s short films based on his wife Anaïs Nin writings, the most notable being Bells of Atlantis (1952). Then Louis managed to haul up a really big fish: an assignment to provide incidental music for the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet.

Louis designed individual sound generator circuits for particular themes and motifs, rather than using standard sound generators—this was an innovative approach to composition, where each circuit had its own characteristic voice. It took them eight months just to record the raw sounds and a total of three years to complete the soundscore. The scoring for Forbidden Planet blurred the boundary between sound effects and music so they became indistinguishable from one another—the Barrons found themselves in new, vast sonic territory that few could have imagined, yet alone explored.

Forbidden Planet poster — Theatrical poster for the "Forbidden Planet". Robbie the Robot gets a credit, but what about Louis and Bebe?

On it’s first preview showing Forbidden Planet dazzled and amazed the audience. So did Louis and Bebe’s electronic score. So much so MGM executives took the decision not use a traditional orchestral score or add any more sound effects created by their own sound department. Not a bad result, given the Barrons were initially contracted to create just twenty minutes of electronic sound for the sci-fi movie.

“Then there was the landing of the space ship. That was one of the best cues in the picture — and the audience broke into spontaneous applause.” — Bebe Barron

But the Barrons triumph, like Louis’ circuits, was shortlived. MGM were seeing shadows; imagining terrible things lurking there; imagining that the Musician’s Union might object to the Barrons work being described as “electronic music”. MGM’s fear being that there were no traditional instruments, no musical scales and no chords used in the the Barron’s composition; not even a living breathing human musician performing it. They imagined the Union couldn’t even conceive that sounds generated by autonomous electronic circuits, and then recorded and tinkered with on tape could be music? MGM decided to play it safe and sidestep any possibility of future confrontations by crediting Louis and Bebe’s musical score as “ELECTRONIC TONALITIES”.

Dore Schary MGM letter — Excerpt from the letter in which MGM's Dore Schary first coined the phrase "ELECTRONIC TONALITIES".

To cut a long, and horribly messy, story short, this little bit of semantic footwork on MGMs part almost certainly cost the Barrons a well deserved Academy Award, which ended up in the hands of MGM’s sound dept. Louis protested, “We didn’t work in the sound department, we worked in the music department.” The Barrons hired a young, overzealous lawyer to fight their corner, a crazed, one-million dollar lawsuit ensued, but they lost the case and never scored another film for Hollywood. Which is a tragic loss: it really would have been something special to see a Hitchcock movie with a Barron soundtrack.

Many, many years later, after the flurry of dust had settled, maybe, in hindsight, that dubious end credit did the Barrons a favour. After all, they’re legends, right? Everyone knows they created that radical, cutting-edge, electronic sci-fi soundscore; and in the process white-lined the future of ambient electronic music. The unusual way in which the Louis and Bebe were credited—”ELECTRONIC TONALITIES”—stands out because it sounds far out, and spacey, and weird. It exudes retro-cool kudos and it attracted interest, and did nothing but draw attention to their abilities as composers. Over the decades interest grew, right up until the present day, where the Forbidden Planet soundscore is now considered to be one of the greatest of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps, in the end that credit turned out to be far more valuable than some gaudy, gold-plated trophy.

Lost Legacy

10inch_tape_reel — ¼” open reel audiotape on 10½” reel. Image by Lori Dedeyan. Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections.

Louis and Bebe continued to collaborate musically after they divorced in 1970 and persisted with their use of analogue circuits even after the invention of the Moog synthesiser—they had no interest in working with synthesised sounds as they didn’t possess the texture or complexity of the sounds they sculpted with custom designed circuits, sampled and processed manually—an opinion also held by one of their contemporaries, BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer Delia Derbyshire. After Louis’s death in 1989, Bebe ceased composing as she was dependent on his technical expertise to construct sound generating circuits [Jane Brockman: A conversation with Bebe Barron, 1992]. Bebe passed away in 2008. The circuits, tape reels and other equipment the Barrons used to create their music and the Forbidden Planet filmscore now reside with Louis’s son from his second marriage in his garage in the hills of Los Angeles [Susan Stone: The Barrons: Forgotten Pioneers of Electronic Music (NPR), 2005].

One entire wall of his garage is filled with shelves full of 10½” tape reels, which appear to be in surprisingly good condition, considering their age. These reels could contain material that never made it to the final print of Forbidden Planet. Others may contain finished compositions as yet unheard. Who knows? One thing’s for sure though: playing back and listening and cataloguing all those tapes will keep someone busy for a while.

The old building that once housed the Barrons legendary studio still exists today and it can be found on 9 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, just off 5th Avenue, New York. Sixty years on, the ground floor is now a shoe shop—you’d never guess that the likes of John Cage, Anaïs Nin, Aldous Huxley and MGM staff would have stepped through this unassuming doorway half a century ago to be transported into a magical world of glowing vacuum tubes and whirring magnetic tape reels.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I did putting it together. Researching and writing this was an adventure. It’s as close as you can get to time travel; you feel you’re there in the moment. Not only that, you’re living someone else’s life, someone else’s story. But it’s time to come back to the present; where musicians are patiently waiting for Effectrode to come up with new effects pedal designs.

If you want to hear more about Louis and Bebe’s fantastic adventures in sound then tune in to ‘Return of the Monster from the Id’ which originally aired on Saturday 21st September 2013 evening as part of the BBC Radio 3’s ‘Sound Of Cinema’ season. You’ll hear some weird and wonderful Effectrode tube circuits—vacuum tube buffered ring modulator with neon relaxation oscillators to be exact—sparking, burning and screaming as they were pushed to their limits in an attempt to resurrect the sounds from ‘Forbidden Planet’!

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wordpress_sec_	1 year	Provide protection against hackers, store account details.
wordpress_test_cookie		Test to see if cookies are enabled.
wp-settings-	1 year	WordPress also sets a few wp-settings-{time}-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface.

Cookie	Duration	Description
_ga	2 years	The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors.
_gid	1 day	Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Cookie	Duration	Description
mailchimp_landing_site	1 month	This cookie is used to keep track of newsletter sign ups and client emails at checkout, Mailchimp utilises cookies to store information captured from user input for remarketing purposes.
mailchimp_user_email	1 month	This cookie is used to keep track of newsletter sign ups and client emails at checkout, Mailchimp utilises cookies to store information captured from user input for remarketing purposes.
mailchimp_user_previous_email	1 month	This cookie is used to keep track of newsletter sign ups and client emails at checkout, Mailchimp utilises cookies to store information captured from user input for remarketing purposes.
mailchimp.cart.current_email		This cookie is used to keep track of newsletter sign ups and client emails at checkout, Mailchimp utilises cookies to store information captured from user input for remarketing purposes.
mailchimp.cart.previous_email		This cookie is used to keep track of newsletter sign ups and client emails at checkout, Mailchimp utilises cookies to store information captured from user input for remarketing purposes.

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Louis Barron: Pioneer of Tube Audio Effects