The theme is much more subtle and complex than my mental model.

I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)