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

[darkemeralds]

Personally, I like being "played on" and "played off" in an audio story. My favorite professional audiobooks use a bit of introductory music, just a few seconds, that fades very quickly as the narration begins, and heighten the emotional effect of a great ending with a brief welling-up-and-fading-out of similar music.

Especially at the end, the right kind and amount of music can provide a gentle, swelling notice that the end is approaching, and a ramp from storytime back into real life. Used right, a little music gives a very satisfying closure to what has been, after all, a pretty big commitment of time and emotion on the listener's part.

I've only made a little podfic so far, and I've used music in (I hope) this way. I expect I'll keep doing it because I really like it. Finding the right section of the right song, and fitting the rhythm of my narration to it, fading it in and out at the right rate--all are important, and I spend a lot of time on those things.

[zvi]

Oh, are you aware that there are not a few people for whom any amount of music (vocal or not) at the same time as the narration, makes it difficult to impossible to understand the narrator? You might want to consider offering a music-less version of your podfic as well. And if you don't want to do that, please consider describing the extent of the music use in your posting notes.

[darkemeralds]

It's easy enough to re-save an Audacity project file without the music track, so that would be a simple thing to do.

Since we all seem to be depending currently on Jinjurly's audiofic archive, my only concern would be her effort in uploading, archiving, labeling, and making space for all the versions. I don't have a clear idea of how all that work gets done, but I envision it as being labor intensive and technical. Any ideas about it?

[dodificus]

I know how she does it and it *is* time intensive but she has little helpers. I doubt very much she'd gnash her teeth at having to upload a different version of a podfic (some people already offer two different versions when posting), she really does like to promote diversity.

[darkemeralds]

Good to know. Thanks.

This reminds me of another podfic-adjacent issue that I'd love to see discussed, here or elsewhere, to wit: technical standards.

Bitrate, preferred formats, submission-to-archive preferences, guidelines or preferences as to file size, process for removing and replacing a faulty file--that sort of thing. The ones and zeroes and how they get there.

[zvi]

I don't record, so I don't know much about that. However, feel free to make a post about that yourself! If you don't want to just get into a deep philosophical debate on the issue, podfic_tips is a place to go for technical advice.

[jesse_the_k]

I'm just starting, so I can't imagine what the deep philosophical debates on the issue would address, so please start a post and educate me about them!

(Think of it as a chance to mold young minds.)