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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.
This month we're talking about women of science fiction.
These women inspire us to imagine impossible worlds, alien creatures, and fantastical inventions,
revealing our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
Electronic moans and blips and beeps, buzzing tones and otherworldly echoes,
these are the sounds of science fiction scores.
But less than a century ago, they weren't so commonplace.
Today we're talking about the woman who alongside her husband pioneered the electronic sound of sci-fi we know today.
Please welcome B.B. Barron.
B.B. was born Charlotte Mae Wind in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 16, 1925.
After she finished high school, she got a degree in music at the University of Minnesota.
In 1947, she moved to New York City and continued to pursue an education in music composition.
During this period, she met and married Louis Barron, a fellow musician who was interested in electronics. He gave her the nickname B.B.
The couple's creative partnership began with an unusual wedding gift, a tape recorder. By the late 1940s, these machines were still pretty rare.
B.B. and Louis became fascinated with the newfangled device.
They loved to record conversations with friends and parties in Greenwich Village avant-garde scene. And they got creative with manipulating the tapes, slowing them down, speeding them up, reversing them, and playing audio backwards.
Then Louis read a book by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener about cybernetics.
That's the science of control and communications in both machines and living things.
The book inspired Louis to build homemade electronic circuits with vacuum tubes. Then the couple got to experimenting.
When they activated a circuit, it would come to life, displaying a unique pitch and rhythm.
B.B. and Louis would then record those weird noises and loop the sounds or create echo effects.
When B.B. talked about their process, she made it sound like their circuits were living organisms.
In a later interview, she explained that they never really controlled their circuits' pitches. She said, quote,
Each circuit we built had life spans of their own. I just can't stress that enough because that was always amazing to me.
And once they died, we could never revive them.
This was a time before synthesizers. The peculiar beeps and buzzes the Baron's circuits produced were unlike anything people had heard before.
Their New York apartment became their studio, with piles of equipment and electronics. B.B. and Louis spent hours and hours honing this totally new way of making and combining sounds.
It was B.B.'s job to sort through all the recordings.
All those raw tapes of odd sounds. She called it a terrible job.
B.B. and Louis' pioneering electronic sounds also caught the attention of other artists.
They worked on a year-long project with composer John Cage, culminating in an innovative electroacoustic work entitled William's Mix.
B.B. and Louis also scored several experimental short films. Their big break really came in 1955.
They wanted a chance to pitch their strange sonic brand to MGM executive producer Dory Sherry.
So they chased him down at his wife's art exhibition and asked him to listen to their stuff.
Impressed and intrigued, he decided to hire Louis and B.B. to work on an upcoming film with MGM.
That movie, Forbidden Planet, became a foundational work of science fiction in Hollywood.
It follows the tale of a spaceship crew that journeys from Earth to a strange planet to investigate why its people have gone radio silent. There are eerie landscapes, a hyper-advanced robot, and a hair-raising alien monster.
B.B. and Louis' unearthly electronic score and sound effects complemented them perfectly.
It was the first entirely electronic score used for a feature film in Hollywood history.
A seemingly random ensemble of beeps and groans came together to convey the core emotions of the story.
B.B. in particular had a special skill for translating the sound of their circuits into human feelings like fear and love.
For the Frightful Monsters death scene, they used the sound of their best circuit going dark forever.
B.B. said, You can just hear it going through the agonies of death and winding down.
When Forbidden Planet was released in 1956, critics and audiences praised B.B. and Louis' work.
One critic lauded the quote, Sounds which make the flesh creep with tension and the goose pimples jump with joy.
But a dispute with the Musicians Union, who didn't like the idea of a film scored without instruments, forced the couple to be credited for electronic tonalities instead of a score.
They were also left off the film's Academy Award nominations.
B.B. and Louis never scored a feature film again.
The couple divorced in 1970 but continued to compose together.
B.B. said the long hours their work required were quote, The thing that ended our marriage. So I want to issue a warning. Be careful when you collaborate.
In 1984, B.B. helped found the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States.
Years later, the organization presented her and Louis with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Louis died in 1989. For a while, B.B. stopped composing.
But in the year 2000, she released one final project on her own. The work was called Mixed Emotions.
B.B. said it felt like a continuation of the electronic scoring she and Louis did on Forbidden Planet decades earlier.
B.B. passed away on April 20, 2008. She was 82 years old.
All month we're talking about women of science fiction. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Womanica Podcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow!
