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NATION: B. Barron, 82, composer

Los Angeles Times

April 28, 2008

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LOS ANGELES - Bebe Barron, a pioneering composer who started manipulating sounds after receiving a tape recorder as a wedding present, and who scored the 1956 science-fiction film "Forbidden Planet," the first full-length feature to use only electronic music, has died. She was 82.

Barron died April 20 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications related to old age, said her son, Adam Barron.

With her engineer husband, Louis Barron, she created "a soundscape for 'Forbidden Planet' that no one could ever have imagined," said Jon Burlingame, a film-music historian who teaches at the University of Southern California. "It was hugely groundbreaking."

The soundtrack "may have done more than anything to popularize electronic music," wrote Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed in 2006.

Until the movie's release, such music belonged exclusively to the academic and avant-garde recording studio.

Because the modern synthesizer was still evolving, the couple created electronic circuits, which produced tones they altered with a tape recorder. Louis usually built the circuits while Bebe pieced together the beeps, burbles and bubblings into a score that even the Barrons were reluctant to call "music." In his 1956 review of "Forbidden Planet," Philip K. Scheuer wrote in the Times that the "electronic tonalities" - as the score was credited - heightened "the strangeness and terror" of life on another planet.

The Barrons had created the prototypical science-fiction soundtrack.

"The score was an extraordinary achievement," Burlingame said. "It showed the way for music and sound design to more or less merge. When you listen to that movie, you don't know when you are listening to sound effects or music. The whole line is blurred."

After a cousin of Louis' gave the newlyweds a tape recorder in 1947, they created early audio books featuring writer friends including Anais Nin and Aldous Huxley reading their works. The books sold well, but the Barrons failed to make money, Bebe later said.

By 1949, the couple had set up one of the earliest private electroacoustic music studios, in Manhattan, and began experimenting with electronically generated sounds, said Barry Schrader, a music professor at the California Institute of the Arts and a composer of electroacoustic music.

The Barrons also collaborated on concerts and special effects for the Broadway shows "A Visit to a Small Planet," which debuted in 1957, and the "The Happiest Girl in the World" in 1961.

In 1962, they moved to Hollywood but never worked on another major film. One major reason was the advent of commercial synthesizers, which with the push of a button could simulate the sounds the Barrons once took weeks to complete.

An only child, Bebe Barron was born Charlotte Wind on June 16, 1925, in Minneapolis. Her parents, Frank and Ruth Wind, owned an Army-Navy surplus store in Fargo, N.D. As an adult, her husband called her Bebe, pronounced "bee-bee," and she took it as her first name.

While attending the University of Minnesota, she studied music composition but received a bachelor's degree in Spanish and a master's in political science. She also spent a year studying music at the University of Mexico.

In addition to her son, Barron is survived by her second husband, screenwriter Leonard Neubauer of West Los Angeles.