Louis and Bebe Barron's composition for Forbidden Planet is credited as the first fully electronic soundtrack to a movie. Louis and Bebe Barron married in 1947 and moved to Greenwich Village and began experimenting with musique concrète.
Says Wikipedia: The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and unpredictable because they were actually overloading the circuits until they burned out to create the sounds. The Barrons could never recreate the same sounds again, though they later tried very hard to recreate their signature sound from Forbidden Planet. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.
If you listen to this without keeping note of the (albeit hilarious and absurdly descriptive) track titles; you could easily shelve this alongside Michel Chion, Iannis Xenakis, and Conrad Schnitzler.
On the back of the Forbidden Planet record sleeve, the Barrons explained:
We design and construct electronic circuits which function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. [. . .]. In scoring Forbidden Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a "voice". [. . .]. We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.
Fun facts:
"Bebe" Barron was nicknamed by Anaïs Nin
The Barrons made some of the first audio recordings of Henry Miller reading his work aloud, and Anaïs Nin's full version of House of Incest.
Said Nin of their music,
"[Barrons' music sounds like] a molecule that has stubbed its toes." — From the Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 7
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