Deliaphonica Game

The Deliaphonica Game is a fun activity we have cooked up with our board of trustees as a playful way of celebrating Delia’s landmark 80th birthday. The aim is to highlight Delia’s atmospheric and quirky music and her interest in using non-musical sounds to make early electronic music.
Delia Derbyshire found music in every sound she heard. From the terrifying thrum of the bombs falling on her home city of Coventry when she was a child, through the endlessly-varying tonalities of the human voice, to the sounds of wild animals and the internal combustion engine.
Mark Ayres

DD Estate, BBC archivist and member of current The Radiophonic Workshop band

How To Play the Deliaphonica Game

 

The Deliaphonica Game is a web based app which gives a small insight into how Delia worked by making music from loops, samples and effects.

Step 1

Choose which loop package you would like to try out – we will create more packages once we have collected submissions to our Deliaphonica Soundbank (more info below).

Step 2

You can turn the different musical layers on and off to create the music you want to hear.  Try the different melodies (2 variations), bloop loops (lower frequency sounds) and bleep loops (higher frequency sounds).

Step 3

You can add your own textures by playing the one shot sample sounds at the bottom of the screen.  These are all taken from the Deliaphonica Soundbank, fun noises that have been found in day-to-day life.

Step 4

Now it’s time to get really creative by clicking on the effects buttons.  Like an Instagram filter but for sound, the app has built-in special effects that change how each sample sounds.

Acknowledgements

The Deliaphonica game was developed in collaboration with David Boultbee, BREAD art Ltd.

Massive thank you to the following musicians for sending us sounds and loops to get our Deliaphonica Game started:

Mandy Wigby, Julie McLarnon (Analogue Catalogue Studios), Paddy Kingsland (The BBC Radiophonic Workshop), Uno Prism, Liam Maloney, Caro C, Alice Richards (mixed and composed the Alice Waltz), David Huggins & Ian Potter for Deliaphonica Soundbank contributions (send us a sound here!) and The Delia Derbyshire Estate for permission to use the two snippets of Delia’s voice!

Want to continue learning how to make electronic music?

If you enjoyed our Deliaphonica game, we can suggest a few routes for progression:

  • Garageband – a virtual music studio app for Apple and Android devices.
  • Walk Band – a virtual music studio app customised for Android.
  • Audacity – free open source, cross-platform audio software for multi-track recording and editing.
  • Digital Audio Workstations for computer: Ableton Live, Logic (Apple), Fruity Loops, Reason and many more.
  • Study electronic music! Search engine keywords: electronic music courses (online or near you).
  • Visit our DD Archive page.
  • Discover electronic music artists via your favourite online platforms and electronic music magazines, electronic music blogs and databases like female:pressure.

 

 

Feedback

 

We hope you enjoy playing with the web based platform. Please be aware that like Delia did, we are pushing the limits of what is possible on a website, so buffering and timing delays might occur depending on your internet connection and data capacity on your device.

Please give us any feedback – happy or not – so we can review and improve the experience if necessary. Please do report any technical problems or bugs via our contact page so we can do our best to fix these too. Thank you!

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