DOCTOR WHO: THE TARDIS

This is such as biggie that it really needs it's own post. The TARDIS take-off sound is one of the few sound effects that's now classified as music for copyright reasons. It's basically the sound of the bass strings of a piano scraped with a door key, slowed down, sped up, repeated echoed and fed back on itself until it became a high pitched whine heading off into infinity.

The TARDIS sound is an icon. It can't be used to convey any other event other than a particular type of time-machine materialising and dematerialising in a particular programme. If it was used for any other event, any viewer familiar with Doctor Who at any time will reject the sound. Like Tarzan, there's no way to repurpose the sound for any other use. The particular combination of bombastic bass notes and top end bleeps and whistling is also the sort of sound no one would have the guts to use for the first time these days. In short, it's a remarkable achievement in sound design.

Here is the first TARDIS dematerialisation from the very first episode in 1963 and was the few, if not only occasions where the full sound effect was heard.


The thud should be familiar to anyone who's ever bumped their legs into a piano whilst playing.
Throughout the 60's and early 70's, the series experimented with how the sound was presented. The sound would audible within the TARDIS on some occasions, not at all on others, variations made and eventually a dedicated landing sound (the take-off in reverse). By the mid 70's it had more or less stabilised to no sound audible inside the TARDIS and a specific take off and landing sound heard outside. The new series has shaken up that standard but as it's a new series for a new audience, it works best if you treat it as a separate entity in the same universe (for example: Classic Trek and TNG).


 It's actually pretty good consistency for a series that has racked up 32+ seasons. I'm one of those pedants who gets annoyed at the changing gun sounds in Star Wars and that's inside of 12 hours of movies.



Note: Doctor Who has always been very popular but has always brought out the inner nerd in many of us. When I started making little movies on videotape in the 80's with Star Wars figures, it was Star Wars figures wrapped in different coloured electrical tape to make Doctor Who characters. So it comes as no surprise to me in the YouTube era with Doctor Who once again popular with people of all ages that the internet is clogged with Doctor Who fan videos and 90% of them are someone's attempt at a TARDIS take-off. It's very hard to find an actual video of the TARDIS from the series.