How's about this for some brave new world-ery? Very interesting piece in The Atlantic about a company called Booktrack, which "creat[es] synchronized soundtracks for e-books that dramatically boost the reader's imagination and engagement".
The company was founded by brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, after Mark realised that "as he selected his own music-reading pairings" he was "choosing songs that emotionally corresponded to the words on the page". Inspired, the pair set about devising "movie-like soundtracks for digital books" (it only works for digital books, as the soundtrack needs to be linked to the page you're reading), combining sound effects and original music. They only have tracks for a handful of books so far, but if you click on the copy of Sherlock Holmes on the top shelf on this page, and watch the trailer, you get a sense of where they're going with it.
It's an interesting idea, and I'd quite like to try it out. If done well, I guess it could potentially enhance the reading experience, though I worry - even from watching that brief Sherlock Holmes snippet - that the words and the sound effects would fall out of sync too easily. My only real concern is that I'd be sorry to see the demise of the accidental soundtracks that have punctuated my own reading life.
I've a bunch of books on my shelves that remain organically bound up with the music I was listening too when I was reading them, the most recent of which, added at around this time last year, is Iain M Banks's latest Culture novel, Surface Detail, which I read in preparation for interviewing him at the Cheltenham literary festival. It's a big old beast of a book and it took me a few evenings to get through it – evenings which were spent on the sofa with the same compilation CD playing in the background, over and over. Banks's tale of tattooed slaves, virtual hells and never-ending wars is now inextricably tangled, in my mind, with the strains of The Handsome Family and Sad Brad Smith. The words and the music infiltrate and play off one another, and the curious links I've found between them seem more yielding to me than a tailor-made, carefully calibrated soundtrack could hope to be. It's the same argument, at root, as the one that advises caution when adapting books for television: if visuals or audios are imposed on a book, you lose the capacity to conjure up your own.
Anyway, it's going to be a while before Booktrack is up and running to the extent that we can really judge what their soundtracks bring to literature – so meanwhile, how about we have a stab at it ourselves? Choose a book that you'd like to devise a soundtrack for, use 8track or Spotify (or, of course, whichever site you wish) to create it, and link to it in the comments below. I look forward to listening.
