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podficmeta2011-03-03 12:19 pm
podcath) wrote in podficmeta2011-03-03 12:19 pm
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From Hating Music in Podfic to Loving it: A Convert's Journey
Caveat: This is a very personal account, and i don't try to tell anyone how to record or whether to include/exclude music. I changed my mind entirely and thought that might be interesting to some of you. I'm also using my own podfic as examples, mostly because I'm talking about motivations and difficulties in choosing certain songs. I hope to make a music-in-podfic rec post for this year's Amplirecathon 2011 (Signups are still ongoing, and we need lots more people on DW!)
The Beginning: Podfic Music Dislike
I've been meaning to make a post on music in podfic for a while, mostly because I'm a very recent convert. When I first started listening to podfic in SGA, none of them featured music, and that's what I'd gotten used to. Moving into SPN, I started to hear a lot more music (first, actually, in the EVPs, which saw themselves more as podcasts mixing music with speech and different stories) and there were various reasons I started strongly disliking the use of music. (1) The music often wasn't mixed in well so that it was both much too loud and sometimes its quality wasn't very good or consistent with the recording. (2) The choice of music tended to often be well known songs (in SPN often reflecting the style Dean prefers) that already had strong associations for me and that I often didn't like a whole lot. (3) The songs were often played in full (or at least several minutes long) at the beginning of the story, making it impossible to skip if I didn't want to listen to it. (4) In rare cases, there was the reading over music, which made it impossible for me to understand the words themselves.
Epiphany: Violins for Sherlock
In time, I became resigned to this general habit and mostly started ignoring the music, mostly ffwding where I could. Every once in a while, I'd come across a podfic where I really liked the song or where the song seemed really appropriate for the story, but I never thought much about it. And then I listened to FayJay's It's Not A Violin. And suddenly my entire view of the role of music and its potential changed. In this Sherlock story, Sherlock playing the violin is a central theme, and one particular song he plays is Lady Gaga's Alejandro. Now FayJay has a particular way to choose and use music that i'd noticed before: she tends to pick quite esoteric pieces most times, thus preventing the dangers of overexposure of popular songs and previous associations in many cases. She also picks a brief segment only but puts the full song at the end. In so doing, she placed the music in the role of brief introduction only but gave listeners who wanted to hear the entire piece the choice to do so. In this particular story, then, she found an actual violin only recording of the very song played by Sherlock. She thus not only introduced me to the Vitamin String Quartet but also used the perfect, the only possible recording for this story. And made me start thinking about what music could do in podfic beyond keeping me for 3 minutes from getting to the story and/or making it harder for me to decipher the words.
How to Make that Break
Pretty much all the stories I'd recorded until last fall had been longer, but I really wanted to record something in Sherlock and fell in love with a particular story that had clear section breaks. a lot of longer stories seem to break into parts that are names as chapters whereas there exists a style in shorter prose that works with a vignette-like structure. Breaks between sections need to be demarcated somehow yet a pause isn't always clear. So when I went to record The Perils of Urban Warfare I decided to insert a very short musical segment (5 sec) to show the section breaks. My beta liked it, so I went with it. (One of the hard things in podfic, I think is that there's so little feedback that it's difficult to change or improve, but I have an amazing beta who in a way is my primary audience.) I looked for the Sherlock soundtrack but only found the 2009 movie one. Since the styles were similar, however, I decided to go with that, given that 5 seconds seemed short enough to hopefully just recall a sentiment, not a specific scene.
Matching Music and Fic And I guess with that the dam was broken :) But the more I started to think about including music, the more I started to realize just how important it was to pick the right music selection, the perfect song. I'm not a very musical person, I'm mostly text-based, but I found myself listening to various songs over and over again, trying to get a feel for whether the song matched the mood I had of a story, whether they were a good fit. Sometimes the fit was very personal, like with Ghosts (and its forthcoming sequel Lovers I'm recording right now). I'd been on a Sufjan Stevens kick, and the general dreamy, almost alien mood of his music resonated for me with XF in general. When I looked for a particular song, though, I was kinda literal, and went with Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois (and from the same album John Wayne Gacy Jr for the sequel). A song about UFOs seemed appropriate for any Mulder story and the sequel is a case file hunting a serial killer, so the song seemed appropriate. But more than that, I liked the sound of Sufjan Stevens, the esoteric quality that was both deceptively simple and extremely complex. In fact, for Ghosts I decided to cut the song into 4 pieces and used a section to introduce each of the four parts. Likewise, I started to use different section breaks, sometimes chosen randomly, sometimes meaningfully.
The last five stories I've done have all been in QAF, which offers a wealth of music within the show. There's always the danger of using soundtracks and central theme songs (do we need another vid/podfic in SPN that uses "Carry On My Wayward Son"? :), but given the dearth of QAF podfic, it seemed OK to draw from the show. In Julad's Love of his Life, for example, the central theme is aging and memory. Brian has amnesia and believes he's back in college, viewing his current life through his younger mind. The story is structured around Brian's desire to go out on top, yet he's already missed killing himself at 30, and at the end of the story it becomes clear that his plan to be done with his life at 40 are likewise unrealistic, that he changes his goals and dreams with age. As I was listening to the various soundtracks, the perfect song jumped out: Forever Young. It was recognizable, which wasn't in its favor for me, but the club remix I used fit the general theme of the fandom and the story and the lyrics were perfect for the story, between the amnesia theme mirrored in the "Forever Young" title and the repeated suicide planning reflected in the "Let us die young or let us live forever" line. I ended up using these lines in the beginning and a music only section to divide the sections without distracting from the story too much.
The Problem of Overdetermination It was at that point that I started to realize I was walking around for days thinking about associations and feelings and moods as much as about lines and lyrics and themes. I'd talked with vidders about why they'd choose a song and was always much too obsessed about the lyrics to get where they were using the meaning of the music. But I was finally getting a glimpse of that. For the story I'm just finishing, I wanted something moody, capturing the waiting and uncertainty that the story depicted to me. I finally found a song that worked for me, Chemical Brothers' Where Do I Begin had that feeling of being stuck in place, afraid to go forward, that resonated much of the story (where Brian and Justin meet again in a post 1x21 AU where Brian got the job in New York).
And then, yesterday, I found the scene that used the song on the show. And now I'm thinking about pulling all the 40 section breaks (using 5 different excerpts) out: it's Ted hitting bottom and going into rehab. Whereas I was reading "Sunday morning I'm waking up/ Can't even focus on a coffee cup/ Don't even know whose bed I'm in" as the monotony of Justin and Brian's continuous one-night stands, the show used the lyrics in a much more extreme manner, and I'm now wondering whether a QAF fan would immediately recognize that song and where it was used and not get the same resonance with the story that I had. Then again, maybe i'm just fooling myself anyway; maybe certain music matches a story for me, but for everyone else it's just the annoying distraction that I used to feel about all music in podfic....
ETA: Possibly my favorite example of music istoomuchplor's Inception Steinway!verse. pennyplainknits recorded the first part of this story, Ach des Knaben Augen with musical assistance of xenakis. I discuss it a bit more in Podfic as Transformative Works
The Beginning: Podfic Music Dislike
I've been meaning to make a post on music in podfic for a while, mostly because I'm a very recent convert. When I first started listening to podfic in SGA, none of them featured music, and that's what I'd gotten used to. Moving into SPN, I started to hear a lot more music (first, actually, in the EVPs, which saw themselves more as podcasts mixing music with speech and different stories) and there were various reasons I started strongly disliking the use of music. (1) The music often wasn't mixed in well so that it was both much too loud and sometimes its quality wasn't very good or consistent with the recording. (2) The choice of music tended to often be well known songs (in SPN often reflecting the style Dean prefers) that already had strong associations for me and that I often didn't like a whole lot. (3) The songs were often played in full (or at least several minutes long) at the beginning of the story, making it impossible to skip if I didn't want to listen to it. (4) In rare cases, there was the reading over music, which made it impossible for me to understand the words themselves.
Epiphany: Violins for Sherlock
In time, I became resigned to this general habit and mostly started ignoring the music, mostly ffwding where I could. Every once in a while, I'd come across a podfic where I really liked the song or where the song seemed really appropriate for the story, but I never thought much about it. And then I listened to FayJay's It's Not A Violin. And suddenly my entire view of the role of music and its potential changed. In this Sherlock story, Sherlock playing the violin is a central theme, and one particular song he plays is Lady Gaga's Alejandro. Now FayJay has a particular way to choose and use music that i'd noticed before: she tends to pick quite esoteric pieces most times, thus preventing the dangers of overexposure of popular songs and previous associations in many cases. She also picks a brief segment only but puts the full song at the end. In so doing, she placed the music in the role of brief introduction only but gave listeners who wanted to hear the entire piece the choice to do so. In this particular story, then, she found an actual violin only recording of the very song played by Sherlock. She thus not only introduced me to the Vitamin String Quartet but also used the perfect, the only possible recording for this story. And made me start thinking about what music could do in podfic beyond keeping me for 3 minutes from getting to the story and/or making it harder for me to decipher the words.
How to Make that Break
Pretty much all the stories I'd recorded until last fall had been longer, but I really wanted to record something in Sherlock and fell in love with a particular story that had clear section breaks. a lot of longer stories seem to break into parts that are names as chapters whereas there exists a style in shorter prose that works with a vignette-like structure. Breaks between sections need to be demarcated somehow yet a pause isn't always clear. So when I went to record The Perils of Urban Warfare I decided to insert a very short musical segment (5 sec) to show the section breaks. My beta liked it, so I went with it. (One of the hard things in podfic, I think is that there's so little feedback that it's difficult to change or improve, but I have an amazing beta who in a way is my primary audience.) I looked for the Sherlock soundtrack but only found the 2009 movie one. Since the styles were similar, however, I decided to go with that, given that 5 seconds seemed short enough to hopefully just recall a sentiment, not a specific scene.
Matching Music and Fic And I guess with that the dam was broken :) But the more I started to think about including music, the more I started to realize just how important it was to pick the right music selection, the perfect song. I'm not a very musical person, I'm mostly text-based, but I found myself listening to various songs over and over again, trying to get a feel for whether the song matched the mood I had of a story, whether they were a good fit. Sometimes the fit was very personal, like with Ghosts (and its forthcoming sequel Lovers I'm recording right now). I'd been on a Sufjan Stevens kick, and the general dreamy, almost alien mood of his music resonated for me with XF in general. When I looked for a particular song, though, I was kinda literal, and went with Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois (and from the same album John Wayne Gacy Jr for the sequel). A song about UFOs seemed appropriate for any Mulder story and the sequel is a case file hunting a serial killer, so the song seemed appropriate. But more than that, I liked the sound of Sufjan Stevens, the esoteric quality that was both deceptively simple and extremely complex. In fact, for Ghosts I decided to cut the song into 4 pieces and used a section to introduce each of the four parts. Likewise, I started to use different section breaks, sometimes chosen randomly, sometimes meaningfully.
The last five stories I've done have all been in QAF, which offers a wealth of music within the show. There's always the danger of using soundtracks and central theme songs (do we need another vid/podfic in SPN that uses "Carry On My Wayward Son"? :), but given the dearth of QAF podfic, it seemed OK to draw from the show. In Julad's Love of his Life, for example, the central theme is aging and memory. Brian has amnesia and believes he's back in college, viewing his current life through his younger mind. The story is structured around Brian's desire to go out on top, yet he's already missed killing himself at 30, and at the end of the story it becomes clear that his plan to be done with his life at 40 are likewise unrealistic, that he changes his goals and dreams with age. As I was listening to the various soundtracks, the perfect song jumped out: Forever Young. It was recognizable, which wasn't in its favor for me, but the club remix I used fit the general theme of the fandom and the story and the lyrics were perfect for the story, between the amnesia theme mirrored in the "Forever Young" title and the repeated suicide planning reflected in the "Let us die young or let us live forever" line. I ended up using these lines in the beginning and a music only section to divide the sections without distracting from the story too much.
The Problem of Overdetermination It was at that point that I started to realize I was walking around for days thinking about associations and feelings and moods as much as about lines and lyrics and themes. I'd talked with vidders about why they'd choose a song and was always much too obsessed about the lyrics to get where they were using the meaning of the music. But I was finally getting a glimpse of that. For the story I'm just finishing, I wanted something moody, capturing the waiting and uncertainty that the story depicted to me. I finally found a song that worked for me, Chemical Brothers' Where Do I Begin had that feeling of being stuck in place, afraid to go forward, that resonated much of the story (where Brian and Justin meet again in a post 1x21 AU where Brian got the job in New York).
And then, yesterday, I found the scene that used the song on the show. And now I'm thinking about pulling all the 40 section breaks (using 5 different excerpts) out: it's Ted hitting bottom and going into rehab. Whereas I was reading "Sunday morning I'm waking up/ Can't even focus on a coffee cup/ Don't even know whose bed I'm in" as the monotony of Justin and Brian's continuous one-night stands, the show used the lyrics in a much more extreme manner, and I'm now wondering whether a QAF fan would immediately recognize that song and where it was used and not get the same resonance with the story that I had. Then again, maybe i'm just fooling myself anyway; maybe certain music matches a story for me, but for everyone else it's just the annoying distraction that I used to feel about all music in podfic....
ETA: Possibly my favorite example of music is
toomuchplor's Inception Steinway!verse. pennyplainknits recorded the first part of this story, Ach des Knaben Augen with musical assistance of xenakis. I discuss it a bit more in Podfic as Transformative Works
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<3
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(And, really, I was thinking a lot about our conversations about the music i've used in the qaf stories. off to check out your beta comments :)