The groundbreaking Forbidden Planet soundtrack is credited as the first all-electronic music soundtrack for a major commercial movie and was unlike anything that audiences had heard before. In fact, during one preview of Forbidden Planet, the audience actually broke out in spontaneous applause as the sounds of the spaceship landing on Altair IV filled the theater!

Making electronic music was slow and laborious process back in the 1950s. By following the equations presented in the 1948 book, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener, Louis Barron built electronic circuits which he used to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator. After recording the sounds, the couple further manipulated the material by adding effects such as reverb and delay and also by sometimes reversing and changing the speed of certain sounds.

From the liner notes by Louis & Bebe Barron:
We design and construct electronic circuits which function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. In scoring Forbidden Planet - as in all of our work - we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a "voice". We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.

Packaging & Liner Notes
CD: Standard jewel case. 6 page colour booklet containing images from Forbidden Planet and liner notes from Louis & Bebe Barron and Bill Malone.