Listening to Torture and Calling It Music:
The Sonic Palette of Bebe and Louis Barron
Publicity photo of Bebe and Louis Barron in their apartment-studio, 1940s.
I. The Barrons
At the dawn of mid-twentieth century exploration of electro-acoustic techniques, there was a creative partnership whose name is perhaps not as famous as those of Schaeffer or Stockhausen, though they were in many respects as pioneering as those European behemoths. In 1947, a newly-married American couple were given a tape machine as a wedding present. Such devices were at that point a rarity, only obtainable through Louis Barron's family connections at the Minnesota Mining Company (now known as 3M). Louis and Bebe Barron were both musically trained, and Bebe recalls how they saw the possibilities of the tape machine 'immediately'.1
V. Vale and A. Juno, Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II (San Francisco, CA, 1993), 194. ↩
The Barrons set up their apartment in Greenwich Village as one of the first private sound studios in the United States. Numerous artists passed through their doors, including Tennessee Williams and Aldous Huxley, who read their work for tape — a precursor of the audiobook, long before a mass market existed.1 The Barrons' apartment-studio became a hub for avant-garde experimentation, in which they pioneered collaged tape techniques. They worked with John Cage for over a year to make a version of his Williams Mix (1952).
Susan Stone, 'Podcast #43: Bebe Barron', The Dead Ladies Show (blog), 13 May 2021, https://deadladiesshow.com/2021/05/13/podcast-43-bebe-barron/. ↩
John Cage, Williams Mix, (1952).
They also produced the music for a hypnotic experimental film for poet and writer Anaïs Nin, entitled The Bells of Atlantis (1952) in which Nin reads from her extended prose poem, House of Incest.1
Nin became a close, lifelong friend of Bebe's, even becoming the source of her the nickname, 'Bebe'. Bebe Barron on Anais Nin, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-79JExuyEs. ↩
(play) (pause)
Anais Nin, The Bells of Atlantis, (1952).
Realising they needed more income to support their artistic endeavours than could be provided by the production of avant-garde sound collage, the Barrons were resolved to seek work in Hollywood. They crashed a party for the wife of MGM President Dore Schary and blagged their way into producing the score for a new science fiction film that was being produced: a retelling of The Tempest set on a distant, technologically advanced planet, far in the future.1 This film became the B-grade spectacular, Forbidden Planet, released in 1956.
Susan Stone, 'The Barrons: Forgotten Pioneers of Electronic Music', NPR, 7 February 2005, https://www.npr.org/2005/02/07/4486840/the-barrons-forgotten-pioneers-of-electronic-music. ↩
Theatrical poster for the film Forbidden Planet (1956).
Forbidden Planet (1956) opening titles
Forbidden Planet is not a piece of high-brow cinema. Any hypothetical accusation about the film's sexism or hammy acting would be fair. But it was influential in a number of ways. Famously, it was the first mainstream Hollywood film to have an all-electronic score, and it contributed towards the sonic palette now associated with sci-fi as a genre: eerie electronic beeps, bleeps, and bloops. It is also cited as an inspiration by other electronic music pioneers, including Wendy Carlos, who notes in her obituary for Bebe Barron, how the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet 'inspired many of my generation, those of us who followed in their footsteps'.1 Carlos also draws attention to what an enormous artistic accomplishment its soundtrack was, given the rudimentary tools the Barrons had at their disposal, and the intensive labour their process required.2 And it was intensive. Whereas other early practitioners of musique concrète would record and manipulate natural sounds, the Barrons recorded only electronic sounds that they had created. Long before the mass availability of synthesisers, Louis — described by Bebe as a frustrated engineer — would build homemade circuits such as ring modulators and oscillators.
The acoustic output of these circuits was extremely unpredictable. This necessitated recording everything they did to tape, because nothing they produced could be repeated. It then became Bebe's job to sort through the recordings, searching for sounds that held musical promise or which suggested cinematic characters and moods. This was time-consuming work; 'there were days' worth of tape', she recalled in a 2005 interview, 'hours and hours' worth of tape.'3 The recorded material was then treated further: sped up, run through effects, or even slowed down hundreds of times, which required repeated recording and re-recording to tape.
Wendy Carlos, 'On Bebe Barron', 2008, https://www.wendycarlos.com/people/BebeNYC/index.html. ↩
Ibid. ↩
II. Cybernetics and Circuit Abuse
Apart from the tape machine, the other key tool of the Barrons' approach was the work of the founding father of cybernetic theory: Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary field which began in the 1940s, to study control and communication within complicated networks and systems. Bebe recounts how Louis took Wiener's book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine with him everywhere, to every artist bar and avant-garde party they attended.1
Wiener's work was used by Louis for its technical information about the construction of circuits, but he didn't just take technical information about circuit design from this book. Wiener's work was also the source of the artistic philosophy that shaped the Barrons' approach to using their circuits as creative tools.2
A central argument of Wiener's work is the idea that analogies can be drawn between all sorts of systems; from individual nervous systems, to air-conditioning thermostats, to the interactions between individuals and institutions that govern whole societies. What they have in common, he suggests, is that they can all be conceived of as networks that use processes of feedback in order to regulate themselves, preserve information and stave off entropic collapse.3
Inspired by this analogy, the Barrons thought of the circuits they used in their work not as inanimate machines, but as organic lifeforms. This is made clear in an interview Louis and Bebe gave to Keyboard magazine in 1986. 'To me,' Louis explains, 'these circuits are as if a living thing were crying out, expressing itself. There's an organic type of behaviour going on.' Bebe agreed with him, 'The circuits' life cycles have always been kind of a trademark of our stuff.'4 In several interviews, Bebe recounted the time that a group of scientists who were 'studying the secret of life, or the origins of life' had come to visit them in their studio because they had read something Louis had written. 'They were so intrigued by this, they spent a whole day talking to us about the life cycles of our circuits,' she said.5 The Barrons even thought their circuits possessed personalities. While working on Forbidden Planet, they matched each character in the film with a particular circuit, whose dramatic nature the Barrons felt was captured by that circuit's sonic tendencies.6
Given this conceptualisation of their circuits as living things, it can be shocking to read the metaphor the Barrons used to describe the processes they applied to their electronic creations, in order to obtain acoustic material from them. To generate the sounds they wanted, the Barrons would overload their circuits until they were destroyed. The climactic scene of Forbidden Planet, in which we witness the death of the hubristic scientist Doctor Morbius, is scored with the sounds of the final death of the Barrons' best circuit.7 'We used the circuit as it was dying. And you could tell, it was going through hell,' Bebe remarked in 2005.8
Wiener's work was also an inspiration for a number of other 20th century experimental musicians, including Roland Kayn, Max Bense, Brian Eno and John Cage. See Christina Dunbar-Hester, 'Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980', Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 1 (2010): 113–39. ↩
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, (MIT Press, 1961 / 2019). ↩
Ted Greenwald, 'The Self-Destructing Modules Behind Revolutionary 1956 Soundtrack of Forbidden Planet', Effectrode (blog), originally published in Keyboard Magazine, 1986, https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/the-self-destructing-modules-behind-revolutionary-1956-soundtrack-of-forbidden-planet/. ↩
Christina Dunbar-Hester, 'Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980', Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 1 (2010): 113–39. ↩
Jane Brockman, 'Bebe Barron, Memoire', 2014 (first published 1992), https://web.archive.org/web/20140129231512/http://www.janebrockman.org/BebeBarron/BebeBarron.html, 13. ↩
The death scene of Morbius in *Forbidden Planet* (1956)
The metaphor the Barrons used to describe this process was that of torture. 'In order to create electronic life,' Louis remarked, 'you have to be free to abuse the circuit.'1 This wasn't just a passing, casual analogy made in a single interview. Elsewhere, Bebe remarks that their treatment of their electronics was a way of 'Mimicking those experiments done to animals to put them in a state of stress, we would do basically the same things to those circuits, and you could hear them literally shrieking!'2 Sometimes the harried circuits were so overdriven that they blew up, giving out smoke and light.3 This metaphor is all the more violent given that the Barrons did not think of their circuits as inert, mechanical things, as if they were unfeeling automata or dumb tools. They were attracted to them precisely because the circuits behaved as living, breathing entities with personalities and lifespans.
Phil Taylor, 'Louis Barron: Pioneer of Tube Audio Effects', Effectrode (blog), accessed 20 September 2022, https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/louis-barron-pioneer-of-tube-audio-effects/. Emphasis in original. ↩
Timothy Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 200. Emphasis in original. ↩
III. Music from Torture
The implications of this analogy between torture and the production of music deserves attention, not least because this is not the first appearance of this conceptual connection in Western theorisation of music. Unsettling as the invocation of circuit abuse may be, the Barrons form part of a long history in Western philosophy and theology of making use of an analogy between the creation of suffering and the production of aesthetic sound. As John T Hamilton discusses, in numerous traditions, including the Hellenic and Judeo-Christian, there is 'corporal violence implicit in every act of plucking, strumming and striking [an instrument]'.1
Perhaps the most infamous of these mythical associations between torture and music is the story of Phalaris' bull. In the sixth century BC, a tyrant named Phalaris had a bronze statue of a bull made for him. The sculpture was hollow inside, with flutes attached to its nose. Upon giving Phalaris the bull, its sculptor, Perilaus, instructed his master:
If you wish to punish anyone, make him get into this contrivance and lock him up; then attach these flutes to the nose of the bull and have a fire lighted underneath. The man will groan and shriek in the grip of unremitting pain, and his voice will make you the sweetest possible music on the flutes, piping dolefully and lowing piteously; so that while he is punished you are entertained by having flutes played to you.2
'Torture as an Instrument of Music in the Ancient Brazen Bull of Phalaris', Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas, August 2022, https://brewminate.com/torture-as-an-instrument-of-music-in-the-ancient-brazen-bull-of-phalaris/. ↩
Lucian, Lucian, I-VIII, trans. A. M. Harmon (Loeb: Macmillan, 1913), 17-19. ↩
Pierre Woeiriot, Phalaris condemning the sculptor Perillus to the Bronze Bull, after Baldassare Peruzzi (before 1562)
According to Hamilton, this legend was associated with Phalaris' reputation as the first dictator of the ancient world.1
Many centuries later, the story was referred to by theologian and philosopher Kierkegaard, writing under the guise of one of his many literary alter egos, the aesthete. He equates Phalaris' bull with the figure of the poet, described by Kierkegaard as an 'unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.'2 Just as the screams of those inside Phalaris' bull emerge to outsiders as sweet melodies, the pain in the heart of the poet is received by his audience as a charming performance.
An equation between torture and the production of music can also be found in the medieval imagination, for instance, in linking the punishment of the damned in hell. This can be seen in the details of Hieronymus Bosch's painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1500), the right panel of which depicts — with Bosch's characteristically gory inventiveness — a range of tortures inflicted by musical instruments, performed upon the souls of those who have gone to hell.
John T. Hamilton, 'Torture as an Instrument of Music in the Ancient Brazen Bull of Phalaris', Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas, August 2022, https://brewminate.com/torture-as-an-instrument-of-music-in-the-ancient-brazen-bull-of-phalaris/. ↩
Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's Writing, III, Part I: Either/Or (Princeton University Press, 1987), 19. ↩
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1480-1505)
One poor soul is flayed within the strings of a harp. Another is attached by devils to the neck of a lute. Someone is stuck inside a large hurdy-gurdy, waiting for the figure above them to turn the wheel and grind them up. A soul is shoved into the neck of a large horn. A demon bangs on a drum, inside which we can see the frightened face of a trapped creature. At least one person has a flute jammed up their fundament, while another group of figures reads music that has been branded upon a pair of buttocks.
The Barrons extend these ancient and medieval myths not by conceiving of the torture of the flesh, but of the machine. In the examples above, it is human or animal bodies that are burnt, stretched, and flayed in order to force out beautiful sounds. As Hamilton notes, for the ancients, the myth of the origin of music in torture was about sublimation, as 'modifying flesh or viscera into resonant material, the inventor of musical instruments effects a kind of dematerialization, a sublimation that permits sounds to detach from a corporeal source. Music is premised on the destruction of a body.'1 In the Barrons' technique, however, it is not flesh that is pushed beyond what it can withstand, but vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, and semiconductors.2 The body that is destroyed is a relatively new technology: the circuit.
Bebe lists their main pieces of equipment in Jane Brockman, 'Bebe Barron, Memoire', 2014 (first published 1992), https://web.archive.org/web/20140129231512/http://www.janebrockman.org/BebeBarron/BebeBarron.html, 5. ↩
V. The Sound of the Future
The sounds created by the Barrons went on to shape the sonic palette of science fiction. While the burbles and slowed-down roars of electrons gone mad are recognisable today as 'the sounds of sci-fi', what they served to conjure initially, when this genre was still inchoate and forming, was the idea of the future. These were novel noises, never heard before on screen, as can be seen in the fact that the Barrons are credited not as creating music, a soundtrack or composition, but as providing 'electronic tonalities'. This credit was, in part, a way to reach a compromise with various musicians unions, of which the Barrons were not members (and who perhaps feared that their orchestral jobs would be replaced by burgeoning electronic music techniques).1 The use of the term 'electronic tonalities' also indicates how strange these sounds were in the 1950s, and their attendant capacities to evoke alien planets and faraway stretches of the galaxy. The novelty of these tones allows the film to suggest technologies unimagined, and powers not yet possible.
Terry Matthew, 'Louis and Bebe Barron: Forbidden Planet at the Dawn of Electronic Music', 5 Magazine, 4 March 2015, https://5mag.net/features/louis-and-bebe-barron-forbidden-planet/.. ↩
Still from opening credits for Forbidden Planet.
This sonic landscape was not only strange, but often tense and menacing. The sound world that the Barrons produced is full of rising blares, overwrought drones, and throbbing hums. The film's producer, Dore Schary, reportedly asked the Barrons, while making the film, if they could 'do fear'. Bebe Barron later reflected that in fact, 'well that's all we could do really – fear.'1 Bebe also recalls how they would use sine waves as the basis of their sounds before manipulating them on tape, but whereas sine waves usually 'come out sounding beautiful and perfect … somehow ours got something fearsome sounding'.2
In a sense, the question of why the film is so tense is not a mystery. Forbidden Planet is a retelling of an allegory that has been told many times concerning an anxiety about technology. The film begins with spacemen arriving on Altair IV, the forbidden planet of the film's title, to discover a mysterious scientist who is studying the fate of long-extinct species named the Krell. The Krell, it becomes apparent, were destroyed by their own ambition for technological dominance. As their industrial and scientific knowledge grew and became all-powerful, the darker, repressed forces of their civilisation increased as well, until the Krell were wiped out overnight by monstrous manifestations of their collective Id, supercharged and made omnipotent by the Krell's scientific mastery.
This is, in other words, a story of a civilisation whose thirst for knowledge, power, and technological advancement unleashed powers beyond their control. It speaks of a fear about scientific progress, a sense that technology is a type of power we set in motion whose consequences we cannot ultimately determine. But this unease with the destructive potential of technology is not only present in the film at the level of theme or metaphor. The electronic tonalities that give Forbidden Planet its eerie atmosphere were themselves made by processes of destruction. This futuristic story about chaotic, repressed forces coming back to obliterate an orderly civilisational system is itself soundtracked by the literal sound of an orderly technological system being obliterated. The sonic vocabulary of science fiction, the sound palette that enables the atmosphere of futurity, has its origin in the Barrons' revival of an ancient conceptual proximity between the production of music and torture.
Ibid ↩
Editor/s Liang Luscombe
A scribbled and redrawn map is required for those entering the looped and tangled journey we take with this collection, 'Ellipses: Returning to Techno Utopias and Time Knots'. 'Ellipses' is a glimpse at how contemporary artists and writers continue to foster and return to possibilities embedded in time travel and techno-utopian constructions of digital space through the lens of science fiction of the 1960s-1990s. The collection was developed on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Woiwurrung language group. The editor would like to thank all the artists and writers that trusted her with their work and thinking, thank you also to editorial assistant Casey (Nicholls-Bull) Jones for her thoughtful and collective effects.