Forbidden Tones: Early Electronic Sound Synthesis

by Phil Taylor

Turning the clock back over six decades to a time when analog synthesizers were still on the drawing board and digital sound recording/sampling was just an abstraction, it’s easy to imagine this era as a ‘dark ages’ for electronically synthesized music. Although music technology was in its infancy, a lively avant-garde music scene was in full swing, where musique concrète, was being fueled by developments magnetic tape recording technology and gaining new momentum. The latest recording machines and improved magnetized plastic tape media made it easier to explore sound manipulation by sampling, editing and speed variation. Possibilities for organizing sounds appeared with tape editing, which permitted tape to be spliced and arranged with unprecedented new precision – tiny fragments of sound could be cut, rearranged and spliced together to create completely new sounds with little or no dependency on performance skills of the musician.

At this time (1948) magnetic recording/playback technology was not widely available to the public, however two young musical experimenters (Bebe and Louis Barron) based in New York were fortunate to have connections with the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M). They received an early magnetic tape recorder that as a wedding gift from Louis’ cousin, who was an executive working at 3M. Using their newly acquired equipment, the couple delved into the study of musique concrète, recording everything and everyone. For a brief time, the Barrons held a monopoly on tape recording equipment and their connection with 3M, through Louis’ cousin ensured they had a plentiful supply of magnetic tape for their projects. This allowed them to found one of the first private electro-acoustic studios in 1949, recording and releasing spoken word discs of Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, and Aldous Huxley in a series called Sound Portraits.

Louis studied his music degree at Univeristy of Chicago, however also had a flair for tinkering with electronics. Consequently, he built most of the equipment in their Greenwich Village studio. One of his homemade pieces included a massive speaker capable of reproducing very deep bass. Additionally, he constructed vacuum tube saw-tooth, sine, and square wave oscillators, filters, a spring reverb unit, several tube tape machines and ring modulator circuits to generate sounds. Bebe would record and archive these sounds, building a working library, where she could post-process the material by adding reverb and delay and also by sometimes reversing and changing the speed of certain sounds. Multi-tracking was performed with three machines, where the outputs of two recorders were manually synchronized and fed into an input of a third one, recording two separate sources simultaneously. Their thriving studio business brought in enough income to acquire additional equipment, including a Stancil-Hoffmann reel-to-reel custom built to their specification for looping samples and changing their speed.

Louis spent a great deal of time researching sound synthesis and at one point was intensively studying the 1948 book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener. Based on principles and equations described in the text, he developed and experimented with ring modulator circuits to generate the “bleeps, blurps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums and screeches”. Louis catalogued his circuit designs on thousands of note cards like the one shown on the left. Meticulously hand-building circuits, recording them and further manipulating the material by adding reverb, delay, reversing, etc. was a lengthy and laborious process, however the Barrons were sculpting magnificent and unique soundscapes with a bleak beauty and stark finesse not found in the work of their contemporaries.

During the early 1950s they and their studio were hired by John Cage for his first tape work, Williams Mix – Louis and Bebe recorded over 600 different sounds, cutting, arranging and them to create a four and a half minute piece. The Barrons moved on to produce music and sound effects for several short experimental films, scoring three of Ian Hugo’s short films based on his wife Anaïs Nin writings, the most notable being Bells of Atlantis (1952). Their next big project was to provide incidental music to a conventional orchestral score for Forbidden Planet, however the Barrons ended up scoring the entire film, along with many of the film’s sound effects. Louis designed individual sound generator circuits for particular themes and motifs, rather than using standard sound generators – this was an innovative approach to composition, where each circuit had its own characteristic voice. The scoring for Forbidden Planet blurred the boundary between sound effects and music so they became indistinguishable from one another – the Barrons had a vast new electro-acoustic territory to explore and began laying down the lines for the future of electronic and dance music.