Influential and innovative composer of electronic music

Along with her husband Louis, Bebe Barron, who died on 22 April, 2008, was a pioneer of electronic music whose name became inextricably linked to the history of the genre and music in general.

She and her husband were best known for their soundtrack to the 1956 film Forbidden Planet which was the first fully electronic film score and elegantly straddled the boundary between music and sound effects.

They began making electronic music in the late 1940s, long before the technology existed to make the process anything but laborious. But the equipment and techniques they developed not only became important in the musical world but also in the wider field of cybernetic theory.

Bebe (born Charlotte Wind in Minneapolis, 16 June, 1925) was the musician in the pairing. She had studied under the modernist composer Wallingford Riegger and musical theorist Henry Cowell at the University of Chicago. She married Louis Barron, an enthusiastic technician, in 1947.

In their Manhattan home they began experimenting with the form of musique concrete , inspired by Norbert Wiener’s seminal 1948 text on cybernetics and its ramifications on the study of laws common to nature and machinery.

In 1950 they completed what is accepted as the first piece of music for magnetic tape, the result of Bebe sifting through hours of distorted recordings made on a tape recorder the Barrons had received as a wedding present, looking for patterns that could be compiled into a meaningful whole. The piece was titled Heavenly Menagerie.

The Barrons’ technique revolved around Louis’ trailblazing work with circuit boards and tape loops which he would manipulate to create the kind of sounds that can be achieved at the touch of a button in modern studios – back in the 1950s, however, every sound they made was unique, random and impossible to recreate exactly.

Their work opened the door to the cutting edge of New York’s creative scene – they would work and socialise with the likes of avant-garde composer John Cage and bohemian author Anais Nin (the latter famously described the Barrons’ music as sounding like "a molecule that has stubbed its toes").

Between 1950 and Louis’ death in 1989 they produced in the region of 17 complete works, though definitive classification was always a rocky issue – the Musician’s Union forced them to describe their Forbidden Planet soundtrack as "electronic tonalities" rather than "music" and they themselves were never sure if what they were creating was music or merely a series of cybernetic experiments.

The Barrons divorced in 1970 but continued to work together for the next two decades. In 2000 Bebe Barron was invited by the University of California to create her first new work in more than 10 years using modern studio technology, resulting in the Mixed Emotions CD.

Bebe Barron died of natural causes aged 82. She was survived by her second husband, Leonard Neubauer, and a son, Adam.

Musician and friend Barry Schrader said: "Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one’s work is to be judged in any regard by its influence, acceptance, longevity and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden Planet is an enormous success … for me, Bebe Barron will always be the First Lady of electronic music."