I've taken apart a couple of discarded pianos. The saddest part is cutting the wires with a wire cutter (watch it, they whip outward) - the sound is so mournful and haunting.
Old pianos, or their parts, have been a part of foley for ages. Plenty of foley studios have parts of pianos lying around, for example, the piano harp.
Do you know the sound that the TARDIS makes when it materializes? Part of that sound is someone at the BBC radiophonic workshop scraping a wrench against the strings on a harp from a disassembled piano.
