If music be the food of love, play on

[zvi]

What should music do for a podfic?

I have to admit, most of the time when a podfic has music, I find it really annoying. However, there have been some cases when it was more effective than annoying, and I have tried to tease out what the differences were.

1) The music was used to structure the podfic listening experience. In Written by the Victors, for instance, music helps mark the transition between the Earth-based documentary sections and the third person narrative Atlantis sections.

2) The music was related to the fanfic. In pandarus' reading of Old Country, which is a Harry Potter/Supernatur crossover from Dean's POV, she uses wrock snippets to break up the sections. (Wrock or wizard rock is electric Harry Potter filk. Dean is a classic rock afficionado.) And, the wrock songs relate to the story sections. House of Awesome prefaces the section where Sam and Dean get sorted, and also relates to the fic's overall theme that Sam and Dean don't exactly fit into the normal wizard world's structures.

3) The music is brief. I always forget, but the musical interlude which opens Old Country makes me unhappy, because it's 1:57 seconds, which is at least 1 minute too long. The interlude which opens section two is 35 seconds, and it is perfect, just enough time to set up the story, not so long that I start feeling like maybe I should switch to my favorite radio station, instead of this one that I have landed on randomly. (And in this particular instance, I actually like In Your Shadow, which is what the too long snippet comes from. I don't have an example of a too long music section with music I dislike, because I've deleted any such podfics.)

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How do you like music in podfic? When does it work for you and when does it make you want to put in your own mixtape instead? Are there any readers who are getting the balance right, or anyone who gets it really, really wrong? Can someone who likes having entire songs included in podfic, either as a reader or listener, talk about what they like about it?

Comments

[dexwebster]

I don't think I've actually listened to many podfics that have music, and I just went poking around my collection to see if I'm just forgetting them. Of the few times I can remember music in fic, most of them were annoying, usually because they too loud compared to the fic.

The one big exception to this is Gerard Way's (Vampire) Detective Agency (also by Fayjay), a bandom AU fic that

a) uses a song by the band featured in a really entertaining way. The story is about a private detective who caters to the supernatural "midnighter" community of vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc. The intro music is a song called Vampires Will Never Hurt You, by the band featured in the fic, which I thought was pretty hilarious.

b) has PSA/statute excerpts from the midnighter regulations and such written into the fic, and the podfic offsets them with literally just a few seconds of news-bulletin type music that was really effective.

[zvi]

Oh, yes, I'm familiar with that one, too, and I do mostly like it, except that she includes the whole song at the end of the fic, and the volume is louder than the reast of the story, so it's always sort of a wake up blast at the end, fo rme. (Also, despite the fact that I like to read about them sexing it up, I am not a big fan of MCR's music.)

[dexwebster]

Yeah, I'm not always the biggest fan of their older stuff (which Vampires Will Never Hurt You definitely is) either.

I admit, I'd mentally totally glossed over the song at the end, because normally as soon as it starts, I go, "Ugh," and stop/change the story. I've never listened to it, so I'd kind of forgotten it was there.

[zvi]

I have to say that, although I am normally opposed to sticking entire songs on the beginning or end of a fic, I have to say that I'm sort of resigned to this one, because the story is pretty much songfic. It just makes too much sense for me to really complain about it

[anatsuno]

I would still complain about the shift in levels (I say this as a hypothetical because I've never listened to this one yet, though I have downloaded it)! I have the same issue with Fayjay's podfic of Toft's Homo ex Machina. It's a podfic I LOVE love love love and use to fall asleep to (but not only), but the opening has music and the closing has music (the same song, iirc), and both times the levels are fucked up a ton louder than the words they bracket, which is /horrendous/ and jarring and wakes me up after I fell asleep. So. Yeah. Levels: Probably Even More Important To Me Than Music Y/N.

/rant.

[zvi]

Yes, you are right there. If I am in the wrong part of the sleep cycle, I have, in actual point of fact, been jerked awake by the song. (And it is especially disorienting because it is not a song I would listen to under any other circumstance, so I'm always confused that the song is playing, in addition to all of the other disorientation of waking up unexpectedly.)