Bebe Barron, with her husband Louis Barron (1920-89), is credited with composing the first electronic music on magnetic tape and with creating for Fred McLeod Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) the first wholly electronic score for a Hollywood feature. The film was one of only a handful of science-fiction subjects to be given an “A” budget production by a major Hollywood studio during the 1950s, and obviously inspired the TV series Star Trek. The superb production design that vividly re-created the look of a magazine cover of the period in its evocation of the remote planet Altair-4 was perfectly complemented by the film’s eerie and unique soundtrack; its singularity was attested to by the credit for “Electronic Tonalities” accorded its joint creators, since it plainly was not a music score in the conventional sense.

Born Charlotte May Wind in Minneapolis, she earned an MA in political science at the University of Minnesota, spent a year studying composition and ethnomusicology at the University of Mexico, and in 1947 was married to Louis Barron (who nicknamed her “Bebe”), with whom she moved to New York, where she continued to study composition while working as a researcher for Time-Life. Louis’s cousin had given the couple a tape recorder as a wedding present, which they initially used to record friends and parties. However, inspired by the book Cybernetics (1948) by the mathematician Norbert Weiner, they soon began pooling their respective backgrounds in music and electronics by experimenting with the recording and manipulation of sound, cutting up and reassembling magnetic tape recordings of amplified sounds generated by vacuum tube circuits. Louis would design and construct the circuits, after which Bebe would sift the hours of resulting noise for the most interesting sounds, which might then be further manipulated by varying the speed or by playing them in reverse. In those pre-synthesizer days, this could only by done by physically cutting up the tape and then laboriously sticking it back together again to create the desired sequence of sounds. The initial result was Heavenly Menagerie (1951-52), the first electronic music for magnetic tape composed in America.

In 1948 the Barrons opened in Greenwich Village one of the earliest electro acoustic music studios, catering to an avant-garde clientele that included Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams and Aldous Huxley, of whom the Barrons would routinely make tape recordings, just as Andy Warhol would later film visitors to The Factory. John Cage, who was the first to encourage the Barrons to describe what they were producing as “music”, called upon their facilities and technical expertise for his own debut composition for tape recorder, Williams Mix, a four-minute sound montage that took nearly a year to create during 1952-53.

Another visitor to the Barrons’ studio was Anaïs Nin, who described their music as sounding like “a molecule that has stubbed its toes”, and who introduced them to the cinema with Bells of Atlantis (1952), based on her writings. Other work by the Barrons within the field of avant-garde film-making included producing the soundtrack for Maya Deren’s last completed film The Very Eye of Night (1959), which featured music by Teji Ito. Their first and last contribution to the Hollywood mainstream was Forbidden Planet, which represented MGM’s principal contribution to the sci-fi boom of the 1950s. The Barrons had been discovered by chance by MGM’s production chief, Dore Schary, at a beatnik club in the Village while he was in New York one Christmas, and he hired them on the spot. However, as they did not belong to the Musicians Union, the Barrons were not put forward for an Academy Award, and MGM declined to release a soundtrack album (the Barrons finally released a soundtrack LP on the occasion of the film’s 20th anniversary in 1976).

In 1962 the Barrons moved to Los Angeles and although they were divorced in 1970 (she remarried in 1975), they continued to compose together until his death in 1989. In later years the Barrons largely ignored the developments in music technology, and Bebe’s last work, Mixed Emotions (2000), created at the invitation of the University of California, despite using the latest sound-generating technology, was little different from what she had been producing 50 years earlier. In 1985 she became the first secretary of the Society of Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and also served on the board of directors.

Bebe Barron, avant-garde composer, was born on June 16, 1925. She died on April 20, 2008, aged 82