Bebe and Louis Barron

Louis' cousin, who was an executive at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), gave the newlyweds their first tape recorder as a wedding gift.

[6][1] As a recording medium, it utilized thin plastic tape with an iron oxide coating which could be magnetized..[2] Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrète.

The first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in the United States was completed by the Barrons in 1950 and was titled Heavenly Menagerie.

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematician Norbert Wiener played an important role in the development of the Barrons' composition.

[6] The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior applied to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

While Louis spent most of his time building the circuits and was responsible for all of the recording, Bebe did the composing by sorting through many hours of tape.

Soon after relocation to New York, the Barrons opened a recording studio at 9 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village that catered to the avant-garde scene.

[6] They recorded Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Aldous Huxley reading their work in a form of early audiobook.

In June 1949, Anaïs Nin recorded a full version of House of Incest and four other stories from Under a Glass Bell.

The connection through Louis' cousin working at 3M proved to be vital in obtaining batches of early magnetic tape.

Electronic oscillators that produced sawtooth, sine, and square waves were also home built prize possessions.

[7] Cage also worked in the Barrons' studio on his Music for Magnetic Tape with other notable composers, including Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor.

In the early 50s, the Barrons collaborated with various celebrated filmmakers to provide music and sound effects for art films and experimental cinema.

The Barrons scored three of Ian Hugo's short experimental films based on the writings of his wife Anaïs Nin.

The Barrons assisted Maya Deren in the audio production of the soundtrack for The Very Eye of Night (1959), which featured music by Teiji Ito.

Bridges-Go-Round (1958) by Shirley Clarke featured two alternative soundtracks, one by the Barrons and one by jazz musician Teo Macero.

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.

After the producers heard the initial sample score, the Barrons were assigned an hour and ten minutes of the rest of the film.

During the preview of the movie when the sounds of the spaceship landing on Altair IV filled the theater, the audience broke out in spontaneous applause.

The original screen credit for the film, which was supposed to read "Electronic Music by Louis and Bebe Barron", was changed at the last moment by a contract lawyer from the American Federation of Musicians.

The Musicians' Union forced MGM to title the Forbidden Planet score "electronic tonalities", not "music".

And seeing the handwriting on the wall, used that excuse to deny them membership in the 1950s; the union's primary concern was losing jobs for performers rather than the medium itself.

Bebe's last work was Mixed Emotions in 2000, from raw material collected at the University of California, Santa Barbara studio.

The sounds collected at UCSB were imported into Digital Performer on a Macintosh computer and organized to create Bebe's final work, Mixed Emotions.