Hi, I'm Wendy Sadler, I'm a lecturer in science communication from Cardiff University,
and the director of Science Made Simple.
Now if you're a fan of science fiction films, you probably get absorbed by all the special effects and CGI [computer-generated imagery].
But for me the most interesting thing about science fiction films
are the sound effects that they use.
And today we're going to meet a groundbreaking sound engineer
who was really at the forefront of developing completely new technologies
to do with science fiction sounds, and her name is Delia Derbyshire.
Delia Derbyshire grew up in Coventry in the second world war,
and she was surrounded by the sound of air sirens.
[air siren sounds]
She became fascinated by electronic music,
and how you could make sounds using machines.
She went to study maths and music at Cambridge University, and she wanted to be a sound engineer.
But at the time in the 1960s, most of the studios would not employ a female engineer.
However the BBC Radiophonic workshop would, and that's where she went to work.
Delia Derbyshire: well, the first stage in the realisation of a piece of music music is to construct the individual sounds that we're going to use.
Delia was fascinated by the sounds she heard all around her
and she loved to record the sounds from everyday objects
which she would then use technology to manipulate to make them sound really different.
So we're gonna use a couple of everyday objects here, I've got a paper cup
and a slinky spring and we're going to put them together in a way that would
make Delia proud - we're going to try and create a science-fiction sound effect.
So the slinky provides the vibrations, which are a bit weird and unpredictable,
and the cup makes the sound loud enough for us to hear, so it amplifies it.
And if together you get something like this...
[surreal zap sound effect]
Sort of a weird laser-gun sound effect.
[zap sound]
So what we've got here is a really early electronic instrument.
It's called a theremin and it's a really interesting way of using electronics to create sound.
So here we've got two aerials, there's one here and the flat one on the box,
and if I bring my hand towards them... this flat aerial controls the volume,
or the amplitude of the wave, so that's how loud it is.
And this one controls the frequency,
or the pitch of the wave - that's how high or low the note is.
[surreal wailing sounds]
You can see it makes quite cool science-fiction sounds, which is really great.
Incredibly hard to play!
It works because you've got basically capacitors inside here,
in this circuit and your hand is acting like one plate of one of the capacitors,
so the closer you are to that aerial the shorter the distance is,
and that affects the voltage going out of the circuit, and that might control
the pitch of the note or it might control the volume of the note depending
on which aerial you're at.
Now there was a myth going around that this is what
Delia used to record the Doctor Who theme but that isn't the case, she would
have used the oscillators and changed those pitches like that.
What Delia would have done is put together all these new electronic sounds
into a whole piece of music. She would have recorded them onto tape machines,
played them at different speeds, looped them around, sped them up, and slowed them down,
and all of this would have taken her weeks.
And it's stuff we can do these just with the touch of a button.
So her dedication to electronic music is phenomenal.
And she created what is billed as the first ever electronic music TV theme.
As a physics music geek myself I have to say she's an unsung
heroine of mine, and I think she should go down in the history books as being a
real ground breaker in electronic music.
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Thanks for watching!