Composer Bebe Barron died of natural causes on 20 April 2008. Born Charlotte May Wind in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 16 June 1926, she was, with her husband Louis, the composer of the first electronic score for a feature film. That composition was “the eerie gulps and burbles, echoes and weeeoooos that accentuated invisible monsters and robotic creatures in the 1956 science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet,” according to the New York Times.
That score “is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music,” said Barry Schrader, a professor of electro-acoustic music at the California Institute of the Arts. While the Barrons created electronically produced themes for the film’s characters and events, Schrader said, their score crossed the traditional line between music and sound effects. “At some points, it’s actually impossible to say whether or not what you’re hearing is music, sound effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now-common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.”
While modern electro-acoustic effects are digitally synthesized, the Barrons used vacuum tubes and tape recorders. According to the Times, “when it came to amplifying vibrations from a stylus on a record, vacuum tubes were a major advance from the days of the phonograph horn. Mr. Barron designed vacuum tube circuits, organizing them in patterns that controlled the flow of electricity to produce combinations of pitch, timbre, volume, and other variables. The sounds were recorded on tape.”
Mrs. Barron earned a music degree at the University of Minnesota in 1947, then moved to New York, where she worked as a researcher for Time-Life while studying music composition. Soon after, she met and married Mr. Barron, who was trained in electronics. One of their wedding gifts urged them into their joint career: a tape recorder. They created a studio in their apartment, which was to be the setting for composer John Cage’s recording of his “Project of Music for Magnetic Tape.” In 1952, they recorded the score for the short film Bells of Atlantis, based on a poem by Anaïs Nin.
In 1955, they met Dore Schary, the president of MGM, at a party, and told him about their unusual recordings. In less than two weeks, they were in Hollywood and signed to work on Schary’s Forbidden Planet.
She was also the composer for 1973’s Space Boy. In 1997, she received the Seamus Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music.
The Barrons divorced in 1970. In 1975, Bebe married Leonard Neubauer, who survives her (Louis died in 1989). She is also survived by her son, Adam, who announced her death, and her stepdaughter Dylan Neubauer.