Movie Music
This combination of spoken words and music works supremely well in the filmΦ, but I hope you will agree that it can also be effective when the words are written down instead.
At about this point the prose purist might observe that writing about music is not at all the same as music itself. We should no more listen to music while reading Tremain or Seth than eat a madeleine while reading Proust. Words are not reality and are striving for a different effect. But that is precisely the point: they are different, and sometimes the effect that an author is striving for will be better achieved with music than with words.
There are plenty of other examples of musically inspired fiction. Milan Kundera was a trained musician, and music influenced both the structure and the content of his wrting. His celebrated novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (accurately retitled by a critic as The Unbearable Heaviness of Reading) even includes part of a Beethoven score that runs through the protagonist's mind. Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro is subtitled "Five Stories of Music and Nightfall" and is designed like a piece of music in five movements. Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill uses musical forms and musical instructions to indicate pace. And so on.
But if these kinds of works represent the limits of musical phiction then it will at most become a small niche. Much more importantly, even stories in which music does not play a central narrative role can benefit from author-selected soundtracks that complement the experience more effectively than the sound of a clattering commuter train or whatever the reader happens to have on their MP3 player.
Among other things, background music can be used to accompany and signal changes in scene or perspective. To see how deft storytellers in other media have become in combining music with narrative, let us stay with the world of films and listen for a few minutes to this remarkable explanation by musician Neil Brand about the score for Alfred Hitchcock's VertigoΦ (excerpted from the 19 December 2008 episode of The Film ProgrammeΦ, presented by Francine Stock).
Audio: BBC Radio 4
(I like the phrase "dreamy bedrock" almost as much as I like "sonic landscape".)
Comparable cases can be built for other great films. David Lean's Lawrence of ArabiaΦ, for example, would still have been impressive without Marice Jarre's score, but it probably wouldn't have become a cultural milestone, and would certainly have been less memorable.
None of this is to say that music should be used indiscriminately. Anyone who has endured the Muzak on a customer-support phone line knows that it can grate or jar just as much as it can sooth or uplift. But this only further emphasises its power. For an amusing illustration of what happens when this power is misused, here is Neil Brand again (this time on a BBC Radio 4 documentary called Waa! Waa! Waa! Waaaah! with presenter Huw Williams) contemplating how Brief Encounter and other classics could have been ruined by the wrong score.
Audio: BBC Radio 4
So within thirty years of the first full-length talkie (the 1927 musical The Jazz SingerΦ), the confluence of moving pictures and audio had been elevated to high art (and farce). How long before text and sound can achieve the same?
For sure there are special challenges, especially in synchronising audible and visual cues, because people do not read in a perfectly steady or linear fashion. For this reason, and for the time being, I therefore see books being scored more like Charlie Chaplin films: to provide an ambience and sense of momentum rather than to be tightly synchronised with the action.
But even this will change. Computer games have already overcome similar challenges with innovations such as adaptive scores that automatically respond to the in-game situation and player behaviour. (This arguably started in 1993 with LucasArts' Star Wars: X-WingΦ.) Add to this the fact that mobile devices capable of tracking their user's gaze are surely coming, and that the likes of Sony are developing systems to discern user emotionsΦ, and it's not hard to see how a similar approach might be adapted to work with written narrative as the reader navigates his or her way through the (electronic) pages.
There is still much work to do on the implementation, and the details will be challenging. But the overall rationale is simple: if everyone from Hollywood directors to the owners of shops, restaurants and airport lounges is already using music to manipulate our emotions, shouldn't the purveyors of narrative fiction be doing the same? It is time that books, like films, and like our lives, had soundtracks too.