Louis and Bebe Barron

Louis (1920–1989) and Bebe (1925–2008) Barron were American pioneers of electronic music who composed the score for Forbidden Planet (1956), the first entirely electronic film score in Hollywood history, built by constructing custom electronic circuits and recording their sounds and failures onto magnetic tape. Working from their Greenwich Village studio, they treated electronic components as living systems whose behaviour and self-destruction provided sonic material for their compositions. Their collaboration with John Cage and the New York experimental music scene placed them within downtown New York's avant-garde, and the score's eerie timbres remain a landmark of early electronic music.