What is immediately apparent is that even after being sped-up the bass sound clip still doesn’t sound anything like a plucked rubber band or a nylon guitar string—there’s too much going on the high-end for that. In fact all that harmonic content firmly convinced me it wasn’t just a plucked steel string either. That bass note had a more energetic, “springy” quality to it.
The two octave-up clip (4X speed) sounded s bit artificial to my ear, as if it had been sped up from its true pitch. The octave-up clip (2X speed) was more realistic. Both clips had “cheap”, “chimey” timbre. The sound had me in mind of a child’s toy “bell piano”. But that wasn’t quite it. A bell piano sounded, well, too bell-like—much too pretty, sparkling with high frequency harmonics.
This sound clips also had certain hard, tinny quality to them. It reminded me of the theme tune for the children’s TV program “The Magic Roundabout“. Or perhaps was more like the “boing” sound that Zebedee (the mischievous tomato on a spring) made? Hmm… Something like that… but I wasn’t convinced this was it either.
At this point you may be thinking this is all very subjective; not the rigorous scientific analysis we were promised earlier. But here we are. At this point, I didn’t have a clue how that sound was made, or even if I’d vari-sped the sound clip to anywhere near its true, original pitch. And it had all started so well. It seemed my analysis was going off the rails.
But then I got a new lead, whilst playing a standard upright piano. I noticed the timbre of one of the notes had a certain quality to it, a quality that reminded me of that elusive bassline. At first I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something about it. My thoughts slipped into new adjustment. Could Delia have used a piano?
The way I see it, she wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of experimenting with stretching steel strings on rack panels, and tuning them up—not if she already had some kind of stringed instrument to hand. Something like an old guitar, or a zither, or a broken-down Sunday school piano; the same old broken-down Sunday school piano that her friend and working colleague Brian Hodgson used to create the TARDIS dematerialisation sound effect, perhaps? That makes more sense, doesn’t it?
“From an early age her musical talent was apparent. She played the violin but her main instrument was the piano and as a young girl she regularly travelled to piano competitions, often winning prizes.” — Clive Blackburn
Further, Derbyshire could hardly have avoided noticing that colossal carcass of a dismembered piano looming in the corner of the Workshop. Surely, she would have been drawn to it, compelled to have a play with it. After all, piano was her instrument—her parents bought her one when she was just eight years old, and she studied the instrument to performer level outside school. Maybe that was it. The elephant in the room; or to be more exact, the piano in the room 12!
