Imaginary Worlds - Music of a Forbidden Planet

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

In the 1950s, the avant-garde music scene in New York and the movie studios of Los Angeles might have seemed like opposite ends of a cultural spectrum. But they came together (and blew apart) when MGM hired Louis and Bebe Barron to write the score for the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. It was the first all-electronic score for a Hollywood film, but not everyone was ready for the future of film music. I talk with Louis’ son David Barron, composer Dorothy Moskowitz, University of Chicago associate professor Jennifer Iverson, and broadcaster and writer John Cavanagh about how the Barrons built a Rube Goldberg-style electronic music studio long before electronic music could be generated with the push of a button -- and why it took decades for their work to be fully appreciated. Thanks to Thomas Rhea (author of Electronic Perspectives: Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments) for permission to use audio from his 1998 interview with Bebe Barron. You can learn more about the Louis and Bebe Barron archive at Forgotten Futures. Philip Shorey’s orchestra is touring with his new score to the 1925 film The Phantom of The Opera. This episode is sponsored by Remi. Go to shopremi.com/IMAGINARY and use the code IMAGINARY to get up to 50% off your nightguard at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ. Built for breakthroughs, with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus at OnePeloton.ca. Hey, everyone. Before we start, I have exciting news.

Imaginary Worlds has been nominated for a Signal Award for Best Arts and Culture Podcast. It's a prestigious award, and I'm really excited about it. That also means the show is eligible to win a listener's choice award. To make that happen, I would really appreciate if you could cast your ballot for imaginary worlds at vote. I'll include a link in the show notes. The deadline is October 9th. And awards are a great way to boost the awareness of the show. I sometimes get messages from people saying they just discovered imaginary worlds,

they binge the entire back catalog, and they can't believe they didn't know about it until now. And I am sure there are more people out there like that. So again, the link is vote. Dot signal award.com, and I will include a link in the show notes. Thank you. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our

disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. When it comes to stories about people in the arts, I have a type. I'm often drawn to stories about people who did something groundbreaking, and they did it for the love of the medium or to push themselves creatively, but they weren't prepared for what could happen after their work became successful. Sometimes they're pushed aside. or they're not fully appreciated until their work is discovered by later generations. It's the battle between art and commerce, which sometimes leaves casualties. My heart always goes out to these people. People like Louis and Beebe Baron.

Louis and Beebe were a married couple. They were composers in the Greenwich Village art scene of the mid-20th century. They knew and worked with legendary figures like the composer John Cage and the writer Anna East Ninn. The Barons also created the score for the 1956 MGM film, Forbidden Planet. This is what the opening credits to Forbidden Planet sounded like. It starts with the MGM lion underneath this electronic music. In fact, this was the first all-electronic score for a Hollywood film. A spaceship flies in to space, space, and the camera pans across the stars.

The letters in the opening credits are warped and distorted, in a very 1950s sci-fi style. John Kavanaugh wrote the liner notes to the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. It broke him old. It was a first. It was revolutionary, and people who went to see that film were hearing something that they had never heard before. And you hear this eerie, magical noise. Where did that come? What kind of instrument is that? I mean, so what they heard set the scene for something that literally was out of this world. The score to Forbidden Planet redefined the sound of science fiction. I can hear a direct connection between that score and the score for movies like Blade Runner.

The legendary sound designer Ben Burt is a huge fan of Louis and B.B. Barron. In fact, he said that Forbidden Planet inspired some of the sounds that he created in the original Star Wars trilogy. This is from a video of Ben Burt giving a demonstration of how the Barron's created music using reel-to-reel tape recorders. First, we'll just by playing a sound on the original tape like this. Into this machine, we start recording. Put it in playback. We start bringing up the feedback. A tape recorder is a great place to start because that's where it all began. In 1947, Louis and Beebe were given a real-to-reel tape recorder as a wedding present.

Today, a tape recorder may seem quaint, but back then it was cutting edge. In fact, John says tape recorders had a mysterious quality about them because the technology had been perfected in Nazi Germany. The recorders had been developed to a high level of performance so that they could replicate something live, the furor's publicity machine, so that speeches could be heard or concerts could be heard from Nazi Germany that suggested, hey, all is well here, bombs? What bombs?

So it wasn't designed to make experimental sound. It was designed to replicate live sound. And instead of going testing, testing, testing, one, two, three, oh, isn't that clever? Now, let's record my nephew or something. In an interview that I read with her, she talks about, oh, we did the usual stuff, slowing things down and turning them backwards. But it wasn't the usual stuff because nobody else had the machine to do it. Louis and Beebe were also enamored with a book called Cybernetics by Norbert Weiner.

The book argued that feedback loops can be seen. as signs of intelligence in living systems or machines. The barons applied these ideas to creating music. Later on, we'll go deep into how they did that, but first they had a more pressing issue to deal with. Making experimental music did not pay the bills in New York City. They had scored a few short films, but they thought they could go even bigger.

Louis and I were absolutely fearless in those days. I guess when you're young, you know, nothing really scares you. But we decided we were right for Hollywood. This is from an interview that B.B. Barron did in 1998 with a music historian named Tom Ray. In the interview, she says that she and Louis had read in the paper that an executive at MGM named Dory Sherry was coming to town

because his wife had an art exhibit. Louis and I decided we were going to crash that show and you know we wondered would we recognize dory sherry since neither of us had ever even seen a picture of him and louis said looked for the guy who looks the least important so we get to this place and here's this guy standing all alone nobody talked to him just standing off in the wings drinking a drink so louis said i bet that's him so we went up to him and asked if he were doris Sherry. And he said, yes. So we commenced telling him our electronic music. I just can't believe the chutzpah of us. And he said, well, he said, I'd like to hear it. Two weeks later,

we were in Hollywood. And we gave him a call thinking, you know, this is silly. He's never going to see us. He said, can he come over this afternoon? And we said, sure. And we brought over all our tapes that we had brought with us and films and everything. And it turned out he didn't want to see the films. Just here are the tapes with his eyes closed. It's a very imaginative man. And he said, do you have any commitments right now? And we said, no. And he said, would you like to work on a film in Hollywood? We said, absolutely. Hiring the Barron's was a risky move, but it could also make Forbidden Planet stand out. Jennifer Iverson is a professor of music at the University of Chicago.

We think of it now like a cheesy B movie, and it wasn't at the time. It was really a very well-polished, high-budget, Hollywood, sci-fi production, the real deal. The Barons were given a print of the film to take back to the East Coast, where they could work on the score. The whole thing happened so quickly and so easily, it must have felt like a dream dream come true. They had no idea that this freelance gig would end up defining their legacy for better and for worse. My stress always comes out in my sleep. If I wake up feeling like I have to unhinge my jaw because it's been clamped for hours, I know that something must be bothering me. That's why I needed a mouth guard for a long time. I was wearing down my teeth to the point

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There used to be a colony of humans there, but when the crew arrives, they discover only two people left. A scientist named Dr. Morbius and his daughter, Altera. The rest of the colony was killed by a mysterious creature. Dr. Morbius gives the crew a tour of the facility. He says the planet used to be inhabited by an ancient race of aliens called the Krell. That recording was made by Krell musicians a half a million years ago. Now if you will follow me, I will show you some of their other remaining artifacts.

Of course, that music was not really made by aliens. It was made by Louis and B.B. Barron. There's also a romantic subplot between the scientist's daughter who was sheltered growing up on this planet and the commander of the spaceship played by a young Leslie Nielsen Why should people want to kiss each other?

It's an old custom All of the really high civilizations go in for it But it's so silly But it's good for you though It stimulates the whole system As a matter of fact you can't be in tip-top health without it Really? I didn't know that.

In scenes like that, the score creates a subtext under the dialogue and gives you a sense that there's something off about this place. This is a big plot spoiler, but it is important in terms of the music. Eventually, we learn that the mysterious creature, which killed the rest of the colony, is the id of Dr. Morbius. His dark side was released accidentally by the technology left behind by those ancient aliens. And the sound of the monster is part of the electronic score. Besides the soundtrack, there is another groundbreaking element in the film.

You are a robot, aren't you? That is correct, sir. For your convenience, I am monitored to respond to the name Robbie. You can probably picture Robbie in your mind because he became a pop culture icon. His head is a glass dome over moving gears, and his legs look like they're made of black bubbles. Robbie was so elaborate and expensive, he cost over 6% of the film's budget. But it paid off. The character went on to do appearances in other movies and TV shows for decades.

There was another technological marvel of the film. The music studio. that Louis and Beebe created in their home to make the electronic score. Imagine every analog device from that time with knobs, switches, levers, reels, buttons, dials, meters, magnetic tape, circuits, and vacuum tubes, all wired into each other.

Music historian Jennifer Iverson. It's a time when there are lots of military surplus stores And it's fairly easy to get electronic parts like oscillators and vacuum tubes, capacitors, resisters. And so they're working on putting these different pieces of electronic equipment together in their own living room. And then they would play the circuits. They would put voltage into the circuit and allow it to make the sounds that it makes, a sine wave sound, a sawtooth sound. And then they would fool around with things. They would work on overdriving the circuits.

they would work on changing the voltage to see what kind of different sounds they could get out of the circuit. I also spoke with David Barron, Louis Barron's son from a second marriage after he and Bibi got divorced. David has been working with the experts to compile and digitize his father's archives, which are now at the Library of Congress. David sent me an example of what the raw tape sounded like before Louis and B.B. spliced it into musical compositions. But he says how they created these sounds, it's still a mystery. You know, this is the most enigmatic aspect of the technology because they were cannibalized after every use.

Because part of the process of recording, part of Louis pushing the circuits to their limits and beyond, involved. destroying them or destroying parts of them, which then he would have to either reconstitute or he would take the entire circuit, break it down to create a new one. No finish circuit remains. Well, you said that only Louis even knew how they worked. Yes, correct. Only Louis knew how they worked. I think Beebe also understood on a very high level how they worked, but that wasn't her interest in their work together. She was more interested in creating an experience about birthing a new emotional language for the technical age. Dorothy Moskowitz saw the circuit's

firsthand. Dorothy is a musician and composer, and Beebe was her mentor. She met the barons after Forbidden Planet had come out. By that point, they had moved to Los Angeles. Angeles and Dorothy went to their house for tea. The barons were proud to show their guests the circuits that they had reconstructed in their West Coast home. This was like a big nursery and it was dark and we were told that nobody else had gone in there. Very few people were allowed into this inner sanctum and there were shelves upon shelves. They were wire shelves. There were metallic shelves and housed on the cells were boxes of some kind and in each shelf they had an array of of vacuum tubes that were glowing in the dark.

And they approached this collection of electronics to my mind as though they were babies. This is our nursery. Be quiet. You know, here we're clinking around drinking tea, eating crackers, and then we go into the nursery. And all of a sudden we're in a mythic world. And we have to be quiet and respectful

and change our tone. And I felt that very strongly, that they respected these inanimate beings as though they were somehow living and respected their life cycles and let them live their life and die as they wanted to die. But the funny thing is they didn't quite do that, though.

In terms of the process, from what I understand, they would run these things through their life cycle until they kind of blew up. They designed them to blow up. They blew up at different intervals. Some would last a day. Some would go on for many days. And they recorded them all

because I don't think there was any other way to handle the input back then. Oh, the tape recorders were in another room. The tape machines, I've just come in and look at it. Those were clearly machines to them. Those were tools. But the tubes were not tools. There were something else going on there.

The conventional wisdom that I heard was that Louis was the engineer, the genius behind the machines, and Bibi was the editor. She'd go through the raw material and craft something musical. But the division of labor was not very strict. David says it was a true collaboration, a feedback loop between these two creative minds. And that they were composing from essentially chapters of each circuit's life. So they would take, you know, a segment of behavior and splice it with a segment of behavior from perhaps another circuit or from the same circuit, but a different time.

they would stretch the sound, they would slow it down, they would manipulate the sound. There was a lot of manipulation of sounds after the recording of the circuit itself. Jennifer Iverson says the Barons believe that each circuit had its own personality and its own unique sound. They were going to make a circuit for each character, and they were going to really exploit the entire range of possibilities on that circuit. And according to Beebe, In Forbidden Planet, the monster stuff

was actually the love music slowed down over a hundred times. When they were done, the barons submitted their score to MGM. John Kavanaugh says the studio was happy with the music,

but the barons weren't entirely happy when they saw the final film. Bibi said that the version that she had on 16mm film was quite different from the final edit and she said it was much simplified finally in a way that might now be termed under the heading of dumbing down

because there was quite a bit of complex Freudian stuff in it about the Ed Monsters and she said that when this was edited out she found the plot quite confusing because the stuff that she understood and the narrative that she understood before was missing That was an early sign that their Hollywood career was not going to go the way they thought it would. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

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The New York Times called it a wonderful trip in space that was out of this world. In real life, the barons were caught between two worlds. They were not part of the community of Hollywood film composers. But John Cage, a luminary in the avant-garde music scene, didn't approve of their score. He described it as disgustingly orchestral and musical, which is quite strange because the Barons were using completely random sound, and then cutting it up and making it into soundtrack pieces. Cage didn't like this, and I don't know why that happened. So on one hand, you've got somebody like John Cage who, you know, listens to, to what they did and think it's too mainstream. What happened on the other end, though,

obviously tell me the story of what happened with the musicians in Hollywood and how they react to the union. The musicians union, and this applies on both sides of the Atlantic, were terrified of tape recorders. Now, Ben Crosby heard the potential of tape recorders to be on one side of the continent and have his radio show going out on the other side of the continent and pre-record things and be on the golf course while his radio shows were going out. And that's why he invested in using the technology that had been found and removed from post-war Germany. The musicians union get a look at this and go, what? No jobs for our boys?

We can't be having that. Tape recorders. Disgusting. Beebe remembered this years later. There was talk about trying to get us to join the union, but we just couldn't work under union circumstances. I mean, it just was wrong for our kind of music, and they would not bend at all. I mean, we had to work under their rules or else we couldn't be a member of the union.

So Dory Sherry came up with the name, electronic tonalities, to kind of evade the whole issue. Jennifer Iverson. MGM credited the film not to Louis and Beebe as composers, or as electronic musicians, but instead they credited them with electronic tonalities. thinking that maybe tonality was a more neutral word, right, to efface the fact that they weren't in the musicians union and they hadn't asked for this permission. Likewise, when the film won awards, the sound team went on stage to accept the awards,

even though the sound team wasn't really involved at all in composing the score. We found out afterwards that MGM had signed an agreement with the musicians union, that they would never use us again, that these were special circumstances, and they would never employ us again. It turned of that other studios joined in on it, too. So consequently, we never were able to work in Hollywood again.

But David Barron says Louis and Beebe didn't make things easier on themselves. Louis approached Dory Sherry and is obviously unfair. And Dory said, well, if you don't like it, you can sue us. And I think he took that literally. So they sued the movie studio. And there's a number of pieces in publications like variety describing the audacity of the Barron's. They tried to, in fact, block the release of the film itself, which was, you know, made them no friends and asked for, at the time, what I think we'd all consider pretty obscene damages from the studio. and my understanding regarding that was that the attorney they chose was a little too gung-ho.

It was just a little too aggressive, a little too enthusiastic about taking down a big studio, and they listened to him, unfortunately. You know, going back to what you're saying about how they reacted to the lawsuit, it's so interesting because I was thinking one of the things that everybody celebrates so much is, isn't this wonderful, this Greenwich Village artistic couple with an amazing amount of artistic integrity, gets the independence to make this, the score for big Hollywood production. But then it's like when things go wrong, it's, you have people who are used to, you know, the world of artistic integrity of these Greenwich Village, like avant-garde musicians.

And then the dog-eat-dog world of like Hollywood is just, it's unfortunately like they were so ill-equipped to handle something like that or to even know what choices to make in terms of even listening to that lawyer or that kind of thing? I think what gave them access to such a huge breakthrough technologically and emotionally was exactly their integrity and their unwillingness to sacrifice that integrity to play any game. you know, I'll tell you this about my father, he refused to lie to me, even about things that would destroy a young child's imagination. I remember asking him when I was four if Santa Claus was real, and he said, no, Santa Claus was not real. And it seemed to follow that neither was the Easter

or Boney or any of those other fables. And I think it was their attachment to the truth that allowed them to see a world that no one had ever seen before. Bibi and Louie went on to work on other projects together. In fact, after they got a divorce in 1970, they still kept working together on short films, industrial films, and other projects. And it was around that time that the music of science fiction started changing. For instance, this is the score to Logan's Run in 1976. It was another big sci-fi film made by MGM. The music is by Jerry Goldsmith.

But there are sections that sound a lot like Forbidden Planet, even though Logan's Run came out 20 years after Forbidden Planet. David says Louis and Beebe tried to get hired on that film. They thought maybe after 20 years, attitudes towards them had changed in Hollywood. I know in the case of Logan's run, they were very enthusiastic and they thought they could create a truly magical

and transformative experience for viewers. And the director wrote back very coldly saying that we never solicited any help from you, nor are we interested in hearing your opinion or getting any form of audition from you. Thank you very much. In the 1950s, the Barons were denied credit as musicians. In the 70s, they were being denied the respect that they frankly deserved for opening up a whole new way of scoring science fiction films. David thinks it's ironic because in forbidden planet, these ancient aliens had

created this alluring type of music, but how they created that music was lost to history. It's like looking into an infinite parallax of mirrors. Louis and Beebe, in relation to forbidden planet, is like that infinite reflection. They created a world that they invited other people to inhabit with them. No one came on board. They were essentially. exiled and years later people want to know how they did it and in many ways it's too late because the originators are gone however their work remains they were explorers fundamentally that's what they love to do exploring worlds never before access Jennifer says, think of the difference between sci-fi movies that lean into an electronic score

in soundtracks that use a lot of classical instruments. You know, when we get brass fanfares in Star Wars, that, you know, there's definitely a kind of human agency that's riding along with a sound like that. But I think it's also true, generally speaking, that an all-electronic score is going to generally tend toward the idea of very cold, very robotic, very technologized landscape. I think orchestral sound tends to really connect us with that feeling of human agency a little more than a synthesized sound world and an entirely immersive synthesized sound world. I do feel the difference in those approaches.

Hearing symphonic music against an alien planet or a high-tech future can give me a sense of familiarity and comfort. It makes me feel like the characters are in charge of their destiny, even if they make the wrong decisions. But a heavily electronic score can make me aware of how much of the universe is vast and unknowable. Our place in the grand scheme of things feels smaller and scarier. Jennifer thinks a big question that hangs over forbidden planet.

The plot of the movie and the controversy around the score is the question, What kind of relationship should we have with technology? It's a bit ironic because we're in this moment with AI right now, where there's a lot of worry about replacement, and in some cases, well-founded worry about replacement. So we get a version of that in the 1950s from the Hollywood Film Score community. Dorothy Moskowitz once asked her mentor, B.B. Barron, about those circuits. And I said, how did you determine what happens when these circuits explain,

fire and how do you predict what you're going to use? And she looked, Dorothy, you have to let the circuitry run its course, unquote. And Beebe hovers over my head. She's the ghost in my studio and she says, let the circuitry run its course. And I go, okay, except the happenstance, except the random. That's part of the process. That is very different from our current fear. that were in a winner-take-all fight for dominance or relevance against machines.

It sounds like Beebe is saying a healthier relationship to have with technology should be more like a feedback loop, with each side listening and responding. Listening and responding. Listening and responding. Listening and responding. Listening and responding. Listening and responding.

Listening and responding. That is it for you. this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to David Barron, Jennifer Iverson, Dorothy Moskowitz, and John Kavanaugh. Also thanks to Tom Ray for permission to use audio of BB Barron from his interview with her. If you like this episode, you should check out my 2021 episode Embracing the Spooky Spooky. It's about how the Theraman became an instrument synonymous with science fiction. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds.

It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with composer Philip Shori about a new score he created for the Phantom of the Opera, the silent film, not the musical. In fact, Philip thinks it's important to remember the original version of the story, where the Phantom was a villain. And Christine wasn't really a love interest as much as a heroine. The pop culture reference has leaned us so much to sympathizing with him

and led him to be like this and you can stop there and just be like, hey guys, cut him a break. But that wouldn't be just to Christine. Philip Shory and his orchestra are currently touring the Upper Midwest, playing their score live with the silent film. I'll include a link to their tour dates

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