How an alien race inspired a synth that plays itself

Author: Mixed Signals · Watch on YouTube

Video authored by the channel shown, not by IANIA; all rights belong to the creator. Transcript and summary generated automatically; the original-language content is preserved.

Original language: English

Original video: How an alien race inspired a synth that plays itself · Channel: Mixed Signals · 11:02 · Watch on YouTube

Topics: AI content generation, AI infrastructure and hardware

Summary

The video traces the origins of the Krell patch from Bebe and Louis Barron’s pioneering electronic score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. It explains how the Barrons used handmade circuits and tape techniques to create sounds that seemed to live and die, and how composer Todd Barton later named a self-playing Buchla patch in their honor. A demonstration breaks down the patch’s cycling envelope, end-of-cycle triggers, and randomized changes to note length, pitch, and timbre. The video concludes that a few simple generative concepts can produce a wide range of evolving, otherworldly sounds.

Key points

Forbidden Planet featured what the video describes as the first all-electronic film score.
Bebe and Louis Barron combined Louis’s handmade circuits with Bebe’s tape-splicing techniques in their New York studio.
Inspired by cybernetics, Louis built circuits that produced sounds autonomously; the Barrons recorded their lifespans on tape.
The American Federation of Musicians objected to the Barrons’ lack of membership and raised concerns about machines replacing musicians.
In 2012, Todd Barton named a self-playing Buchla patch the Krell patch, after the alien race in Forbidden Planet.
A cycling envelope repeatedly opens a VCA, creating a repeating sequence of notes.
An end-of-cycle pulse triggers random values that can vary note length, pitch, wave folding, and FM.
Changing the starting values and modulation ranges, and adding effects, helps produce a wide variety of sounds.

Chapters

Start	Chapter	Summary
00:00	Forbidden Planet and the Barrons	The video introduces the film’s electronic score and the Barrons’ experimental work with tape and handmade circuits.
03:39	The Krell patch takes shape	After recounting the Barrons’ career, the video explains how Todd Barton named a self-playing patch in their honor.
04:40	Building the patch	A demonstration shows how a cycling envelope and end-of-cycle pulses create repeating notes and control randomized changes.
08:54	Exploring the sound and possibilities	The patch’s changing note lengths, pitches, and processing are demonstrated, with effects adding an alien quality.

Quotes

the first ever all electronic one in history — 00:00

They were, in their eyes, actors — 02:36

he decided to name it the Krell patch — 04:09

And that is the end of cycle output here. — 06:16

the possibilities really are endless. — 10:31

Concepts and entities

Forbidden Planet, Bebe Barron, Louis Barron, Todd Barton, Krell patch, Buchla, music concrete, Cybernetics

Full transcript (original language)

00:00 1956 saw the release of the highly influential sci-fi blockbuster Forbidden Planet starring legendary actor Leslie Nielsen. Surely you know him. >> Don’t call me Shirley. >> But aside from pioneering certain aspects in the cinematic realm and being one of the inspirations for Star Trek, it also broke new ground with its film score, the first ever all electronic one in history using sounds made from dying electronic circuits. And almost 60 years later, it inspired a legendary self-playing synthesizer technique known as a crawl patch. Used

00:31 as a rite of passage for those starting out and a great way to learn a bunch of essential synthesis concepts. The story starts in the late 1940s with a bohemian couple, Bebe and Louis Barron. Bebe studied music and composition and Louis was a classically trained pianist, though crucially also had a keen interest in electronics. As a wedding gift, the pair received an early tape machine from Louis’ cousin who happened to be an executive at the company 3M, who you might know from Post-its, Scotch tape, or those sticky picture hangers

01:01 that inevitably leads to your artwork coming clattering down. Anyway, this form of magnetic tape had been developed in Germany before the Second World War, but kept a secret. And there’s a quote out there that the allies had thought that the Germans were doing 24/7 live broadcasts, not knowing that they were in fact using relatively high-fidelity tape recordings. And it had only come across to the US when the allies invaded Germany and found their stockpiles. At the same time, it was a period of heavy experimentation in music and these new technologies inspired new approaches and

01:32 philosophies around composition, including music concrete, which wanted to break from sheet music and conventional instruments entirely and instead focus on recorded sound fragments as source material to produce a sound collage. The Barons got obsessed with this philosophy and having acquired one of the few tape machines out there, they were in a prime position to experiment with this new exciting realm themselves. They set up a studio in New York City where they combined Louis’ wacky handmade circuits with Bebe’s tape splicing techniques, while continuing to fund their endeavors by recording a

02:04 series of audio books voiced by famous names like Aldous Huxley and Tennessee Williams, as well as John Cage’s composition for tape machines, Williams Mix. See, folks, all you need to be successful is have a cousin give you a revolutionary piece of technology, and then use that to record all the famous people you know in your Manhattan studio. Easy. With that experience under their belt, they were ready for the prime time. They managed to convince an MGM producer to listen to their demos,

02:36 and were initially supposed to contribute 20 minutes of sound effects, but when composer Harry Partch left the project, they were hired to score the entire film. Louis was heavily inspired by the book Cybernetics, which among other things discusses self-regulating systems and automation, and set out building circuits using these ideas. The Barons didn’t even consider these circuits an instrument. They were, in their eyes, actors that were born, made a bunch of sounds autonomously, and then died, with their whole lifespan captured on tape. They would also torture the

03:07 circuit, pumping them with voltages way above what they were designed for, leading to screams and screeches and whales that sounded both creepily alive and very novel for the time. Definitely an interesting approach to music making, even today. It seemed to land well with the audience, with the spaceship landing leading to spontaneous applause in the cinema. But, there was a problem. The American Federation of Musicians was unhappy that the Barons were not members, and in a way that mirrors today’s climate, were also worried that this machine-based approach to music

03:39 making would lead to real musicians losing their jobs. So, they got the producers to change the credit from music by Louis and Bebe Barron to electronic tonalities by Louis and Bebe Barron, at the same time robbing them of an Oscar nomination. The Barrons would never score a Hollywood film ever again. Fast forward to 2012 where composer, educator, and general synthesizer wizard Todd Barton was experimenting with his Buchla modular system and came up with a patch using a few basic concepts that essentially played itself but didn’t

04:09 explode at the end of it. And although he wasn’t trying to directly replicate the sounds of the Barron circuits, he decided to name it the Krell patch in homage to their contribution to generative music taken from the name of the alien race in Forbidden Planet. >> [music] >> I don’t think there was a single moment where people decided this would become a rite of passage, but the fact that it’s fundamentally quite simple yet can be extremely deep and fun as well as the fact that it allows you to dip your toes into generative concepts when starting

04:40 out probably contributed to it. So, what exactly is it and how does it sound? All right, so it’s a different day and I have set up a simplified Krell patch here. It may look like there’s a lot of complexity because of all the cables, but there’s only really a couple of tricks to this and the rest is sort of open to personalization and

05:11 customization. Okay, so at the core of this we have a cycling envelope that’s coming out of maths. So, what that means is that it’s going to loop an envelope and every time one envelope finishes it’s just going to play the next one and next one and next one and so on. So, it’s just going to loop infinitely. And I can actually show you what that sounds like if I take these out and turn this on. >> [music]

05:45 >> So, all this is doing is it’s opening the VCA here in a looped fashion, and this oscillator is going into the VCA. So, you can hear sort of a looped note [music] going in. I can make this faster. >> [music] >> And there you go. But, this is not very exciting on its own. It’s a start. It’s going to create notes, but obviously if they’re all the same length and the same pitch, that’s not really going to be a

06:16 very exciting patch. And so, that’s where our first interesting concept comes in. And that is the end of cycle output here. What that essentially means is that as soon as this envelope finishes, it’s going to send a pulse a a quick pulse to tell us that one envelope is finished and the next one’s going to start. So, if I start it again, you can actually see that on the red line here, that every time the envelope finishes, which is that blue line here, it’s going

06:48 to send a little pulse. >> [music] >> And that’s quite nice because we know now when the note is finishing, so we can decide for the next note we’re going to do things a little bit differently and we can modulate some parameters when the next note [music] is going to play. So, that end of cycle pulse is actually going into this input here. And what this module is going to do is every time it receives a trigger, it’s going to pick a random value from a range that I’ve given it, and it’s going to output

07:19 that from one of these outputs. So, it almost works like a sample and hold. And so, perhaps the first thing we want to do is we want to change the length of each note to make it a little bit more exciting. And that’s what these cables here were doing. So, one goes into the fall, which is the decay time, and the other one goes into the rise, which is the attack time. And so, every time we get an end of cycle pulse here, it’s going to choose a different value of fall and rise. And

07:49 therefore, we can get different length of notes. But we don’t have to stop at the length. Using the exact same concept of sample and hold effectively, choosing a different value every time we get a trigger here at the end of a note, we can change some other parameters for the next note that’s about to play. So, the most obvious one is the pitch, and that’s what we’re doing here into oscillator. But we can also change the timbre. So, we’ve got another output coming into here that’s going to change the amount of wave folding that happens. And we can

08:20 also add a little bit of FM. So, in the same way, we’re just choosing a new value and we’re sending it here to change the amount of FM for every single note. So, let’s hear that in action. >> [music] >> Let me turn off our effects for a bit. >> [music]

08:54 >> Let’s get some faster notes going as well. >> [music] [music] >> So, as you can hear, we get long notes, we get short notes, but they’ve also got different pitches. They’ve got slightly different amounts of processing like wave folding and FM. Um and we can obviously play with the starting points of these parameters as well. So,

09:29 >> [music] [music] [music] >> A little too gnarly for my taste, but And then obviously we add our effects back and it sounds a little more otherworldly and alien.

09:59 We can also change, you know, >> [music] [music] >> So as you can see, even with just a few parameters that are being changed randomly and a couple of cool concepts

10:31 to sort of make it play itself, you can get a really cool patch. We can obviously change the starting values of all of these different parameters and we can change the ranges that they’re modulated in. But already this is quite deep and if you play around with this, you’ll get a really wide range of sounds. And that’s before we even look at other types of modules that we haven’t used here, for example. So the possibilities really are endless. And hopefully that makes sense as to why Krell is such a popular patch. If you enjoyed this video, there’s another one for you to watch over here. You can

11:02 support us on Patreon or check out our Discord. The links are in the description. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you next time on Mix Signals. Bye-bye.