Soundtrack For Books

When we watch movies, we'll notice that background music/score is always there. Depending on the scenes, the right background music can drive us to delve deeper into certain emotional state. Without background music, movies will feel static and emotionless. However, in textual stories, music is absent. Readers have to create their own imagination.

For me, as a writer, music helps me write better. The right kind of background music puts me into emotional state, to help me picture my own scene better. Many times, background music inspires me to write new minor plots which originally weren't intended to be written. I heard, other writers use the same musical method when writing. Someone I know also says he likes to paint with loud music for inspiration.

While other writers choose sexy jazzy vocal songs, I go for instrumental music. To me, vocal songs with words are simply distractions. It's akin to someone talking to you while you need to concentrate. It simply doesn't work for me.

To help me write, I keep my own library of background music which I separate in several folders based on moods: calm/sad, happy, tense. Based on the mood I want to achieve, I play the songs in certain folder. The songs are collected from various anime soundtrack, as well as movie. Needless to say, the songs need to be replayed all the time because writing a scene takes much longer than watching a scene. However, listening to the same background music over and over, every day, will get tiresome. Hence, once in a while, I often do music hunting in YouTube to add to my background music library. 

Finding the right background music is not easy either because most of them are composed only to accompany visual scenes which may sound meaningless if it's played on its own. Strangely, I find music from anime works much better for me. Most background music from western series/movies is not melodious. However, Asian music also has its own limit. For example: I certainly can't write a good scene about white lovers in London if I keep hearing Chinese or Japanese melody.

At the moment, I'm playing Titanic soundtrack because it sounds perfect for my current project Timeless: Titanic Chapter. My other project is the first series of Demon Master. For that novella, I play the music from a Japanese anime Cardcaptor Sakura.

It'd be cool if I could release a novel with original background soundtrack and direct readers to play certain music file while reading certain scene. Sadly, such idea seems very impossible, considering I'm just a self-published author.