A substantial mythology has formed around the soundtrack's creation. One of the prevailing notions is that the sounds were generated by torturing and electrically overloading the "cybernetic circuits". There's evidence that this is simply artistic misdirection.
In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed - with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a completely wrong tangent in this regard...)
It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own compositional technique and creative input in order to bolster this mythology.
The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons' cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the 1950s.
Sadly, no mention of Louis and Bebe Barron, who together created the first all-electronic soundtrack for the 1956 movie "Forbidden Planet".
This was before the invention of the synthesizer a few years later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.
And, to this day, no one knows exactly how they created their music... (Almost no one, that is - it's my PhD topic ;-)
Since we're on this topic: Is Western classical music (typified by Bach) really the zenith in our human understanding of the 'universal' language of music?
Certainly, the complex and subtle tunes and harmonies of classical, in particular, give us goosebumps, provoke intense emotional responses. Do the same phenomena occur in other musical cultures? Traditional Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, Indian - their musical expression is markedly different. Try out some ancient Greek scales, from the dawn of our Western civilization: unfamiliar, yet still 'tingly'.
So are there equivalents to Bach that we're just not 'in tune' with? Alternative musical structures that are just as valid, yet wildly unfamiliar?
Aside: I'm glad to see that (so far) no one's referred to it as Krell music.
This is a reference to the 1956 science fiction movie 'Forbidden Planet' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet), which was the first film to use an entirely electronic score, created by husband-and-wife team Louis and Bebe Barron.
The timbres ('electronic tonalities') were generated using rather fascinating vacuum tube circuits. Bebe Barron used these as the basis for her compositions.
The soundtrack superficially appears to consist of weird, unstructured, synthetic sounds. The film's music and sound effects intermingle. But there certainly is a musical structure; it's not just randomly generated sound.
Unfortunately, some electronic musicians generate random sequences or noises and call it 'Krell' music. It's a fundamental (lazy?) misunderstanding of what the Barrons achieved without the use of synthesizers.
In reality, the music was carefully crafted and performed - with an emphasis on performance, rather than random events and sounds. (The genre of "Krell music" went off at a completely wrong tangent in this regard...)
It's unfortunate that Bebe Barron downplayed her own compositional technique and creative input in order to bolster this mythology.
The research is focused on the nature of the Barrons' cybernetic circuits. Using digital equivalents of these circuits, the aim is to recreate the title track, using only the techniques that were available to the Barrons in the 1950s.