I'm glad you made the post, Suela, because it's always good to know how other people feel about these things, and it will colour my choices in the future.

You raised quite two separate issues, though: one aesthetic, and one practical.

wrt using music to bookend podfic (or indeed at chapter breaks), that's something which some listeners actively enjoy, and others actively dislike. When I first started downloading podfic, I got a little surge of glee from listening to the snippet of music at the start of Written by the Victors (this being the first time I'd encountered such a thing). It gave me a happy.

When I started recording podfic, I was doing it first and foremost for my own pleasure - so that I could listen to stories I wanted to listen to, and in the way that I wanted to listen to them. I wasn't even uploading them to an archive initially, just making them for myself to listen to while shopping or at the gym or whatever. After the first few recordings, I figured out how to add in music, and since I was recording a PotC fic, and I have a couple of the PotC soundtracks on my computer, I was chuffed to bits by the realisation that I could incorporate some of Hans Zimmer's music in between sections. It really added a lot to my enjoyment of the story.

In the professional audiobooks I'd listened to at that point (only a handful, admittedly, and a hotchpotch of fiction, lectures and dramatisations) music is generally used to bookend things, and often at chapterbreaks. (And, for that matter, it is sometimes used behind speech, as incidental music, at least in the dramatisation/radio play type recordings.) Perhaps this haphazard sample gave me an unrealistic idea of what was normal or acceptable, but as it happened I actively enjoyed the music as a framing device, and once I figured out how to do it myself, I was chuffed to bits.

Making podfics is a particularly selfish form of amusement for me, because I'm definitely recording with my own pleasure in mind rather than out of either charitable impulses or the hopes of finding a wide audience, and although I don't spend as long thinking about the music as a vidder would do, it is a tangible component of the podfic for me. I enjoy it. It shapes how I feel about the whole story, and I've found myself unable to start recording because I've not been able to find the right music to start off with. I've also had a huge number of people email me saying how much they like the inclusion of music, and wanting details of who various songs/pieces are by. I've found loads of artists myself as a direct result of vids (and, latterly, fanmixes) so I enjoy introducing artists to new audiences in my turn, and clearly a lot of people find that the music does enhance their enjoyment.

I totally respect the fact that it isn't to your taste, and I'm not offended by that at all. In light of your post, I will be giving serious consideration on a case-by-case basis to whether or not to use music at chapter breaks, and I'll probably be more strict about ruling it out than I have been. I don't want to slip into doing it just for the sake of it. At present it varies a lot, whether and how I include music within a podfic. In Gerard Way's (Vampire) Detective Agency, for example, in addition to having MCR's 'Vampires Will Never Hurt You' at the start and the end of the podfic to bookend it (for reasons that I'm sure don't need explicating!), I used a few seconds of a song from 'You're A Good Man Charlie Brown' to get a cheerful "biddlybip biddlybip biddlybip" separation between the main narrative and the various 'found texts' with which the author interspersed her story as her form of world-building - flyers informing people how to deal with the arrival of zombies in their neighbourhood, adverts, snippets of The Valet's Guide etc etc. It was a tiny soundbite that put me in mind of old black'n'white newsreel announcements, and it seemed ideal to the purpose; without some kind of aural equivalent to a row of asterisks, it felt awkward going from the main (continued...)

( continues...) thread of the narrative to these very different sections and back again. In Crown of The Summer Court, otoh, I included music from Ilan Eshkeri's evocative soundtrack to Stardust at each of the chapterbreaks, as well as using it to bookend the story. And I also recorded the elven dialogue twice, and layered it, in order to recreate the vocal effect Astolat describes - since there isn't very much elven dialogue, I thought that hopefully this wasn't too distracting; I got a lot of positive feedback for this too, but it's quite possible that it was problematic for people with hearing difficulties. I wouldn't have thought about that without your post.)

But I hope you won't be offended by the fact that, even knowing that it loses me you as a listener, I do intend to carry on using music. I don't mean that in a combative way - I like Astolat tremendously, but I'll not be reading the American Idol RPF that she's plunged into any time soon, because I don't know who anyone is and it's not really my cup of tea.

I know that there are listeners who dislike UK accents (I myself couldn't listen to more than a few seconds of a Jeeves & Wooster fic being read by an American podficcer, so I completely sympathise there), and listeners who would prefer no music, and listeners who might disagree with my vocal interpretation of character or the emphasis that I place on a particular word, because reading is a very personal and intimate experience, and when one is obliged to experience a text through someone else's lens, whether it's a movie adaptation of a beloved book, or simply an audiobook version, it's not always going to gel.

Frankly, I'm a picky enough listener myself that I tend to record stories rather than download them precisely because I know how I want to hear the story, and it's not always how other people want to read it. I absolutely grok that this goes both ways & I'm not so arrogant as to think that people should want to experience the text the way that I want to experience it. Each to their own! But neither do I want to lessen my own enjoyment by stopping making the podfics I want to listen to myself. And that does include music - not as an afterthought, but as a significant component of the whole that colours and comments on the text.

So that's the aesthetic side of things, with the music bookending stories, and my response is pretty much: YMMV, and I'm sorry it pisses you off - I have a similar flinchflinchflinch response to stumbling across bad fanart interlaced in a Big Bang story, or finding porny their-heads-are-pastede-on-yay manips being posted to LJ coms I follow, so I do kind of get it, and support your right to rant, and to eschew podfics that use music.

(And I can certainly see that in light of this, it might be a good idea to include 'Music/No Music' as one of the criteria that get searched on in the archive. Have you thought about suggesting this to General Jinjur? Or are you not all that bothered? I don't mind emailing her about it, if you want?)

Your other point was about music being played in the background of a podfic whilst the reader is reading. I haven't actually encountered this myself - it does sound very distracting, though, particularly if it is of any long duration, or if it's music that has vocals. And I can definitely see that if one has a hearing problem, it would be the very last thing one needed, quite aside from matters of musical taste. (continued...)

( continues...)

...Having said that, I realise that I have actually included a fragment of music as a lead-in to a new POV which then carries on softly behind narrative for a minute or so in one recording - a snippet of an urgent, spiky and ethereal piece by Dead Can Dance behind the following River POV on Castiel in nwhepcat's SPN/Firefly story Prism:

River can hear him all over the ship. Music runs through his body -- blood, bone, muscles, skin. It pours forth from him, but no one else seems to hear. It's like nothing she's heard before.

She dances with it, in the empty spaces of the cargo bay, then races up the fore companionway when she feels it surging up from the aft. It's soaring and elaborately mathematical. And at the same time, there's a discordant tone, almost buried beneath the complex harmonies.

"Can't you hear it?" she asks the shepherd as she whirls past him. Some preacherman, deaf to the song of angels. River follows the melody, anchored by the hollow rhythm of footsteps on metal mesh steps. She meets the angel halfway down the steps.

"Would you sing your name to me?" she asks.

The song falls out of its mathematical beauty. "I am Dean Winchester," the traveler says.

(At which point the faint thread of incidental music behind the narration is severed.)

Heck, maybe that's precisely what prompted your rant, for all I know. And I'm sorry if that's the case, and that it didn't work for you. I rather liked the effect, and I've had positive feedback on it, but I can perfectly see that if one has hearing problems it would be annoying. And I can certainly buy the argument that the text ought to be able to speak for itself, and just because one has the capacity to add another dimension at that point does not mean that one SHOULD. If I'd read your rant before recording that story, I'd likely not have included it after all.

I don't know that there are many other circumstances which would prompt me to include music behind narration (this having been a very particular combination of character, situation and music), but certainly if it does cross my mind again I'll be reminding myself that some listeners have hearing problems, and do not appreciate having the text fucked with in a ham-handed fashion - I think that's pretty damn compelling, as arguments go.

...oh, Jesus. I had no idea my post was SO long. Wow. Brevity Fail.

flees

Your description of what you did with the music in Prism sounds lovely and appropriate (to me, anyway). And musical interludes, while they may not be everyone's cup of tea, generally don't overlap with the text. Personally, I think they're a great way of marking a scene break when a long pause just isn't sufficient to the task.

What I can't imagine is listening to a story being read while there is music with lyrics being played in the background. There are times when I have trouble reading a book while the radio's going.

Fay, love, what Anne said. You're a dear to think hard about it, both for the good and the bad, but 'Suela's rant, to quote her post directly, was:

But now I'm going to ask you, as politely as I can: do not read over music.

Not intros, outros, section breaks, lead-ins, but actually reading the fic while music is going on -- and, yeah. Either I can't make sense of the story in the first place, can't remember a damned bit of it five minutes later, or my brain tries to follow the music and I can't make sense of that either because there's talking in the way.

(I'm not hearing-impaired, but I'm cognitively utterly fucked when it comes to making any sense at all of recorded speech when there are other soundtracks competing.)

I don't think that what you're describing of your podfics would be the same kind of issue at all for me (and I only speak for me); but at the same time, I think it's a damned fine thing when people stop to think about access issues wrt speech -- too often, they just don't.

And 'Suela, I want to thank you for raising the issue for just that reason. And I'm really sorry it turned into an entitlement-fest on you. Wish I were surprised.

I was kind of taken by surprise because usually stories that use ridiculous plot contrivances and characterization that in no way resembles the characters I'm familiar with reveal themselves fairly early on. With this one, I was really enjoying the set-up, nodding along with the dialogue as sounding right to me and feeling that people's reactions to each other were spot on. Then the massive load of WTF? got air-dropped into the middle of the story, characters started behaving in ways that completely contradicted not only canon but how they behaved earlier in the story, and cardboard original characters started coming out of the woodwork to railroad the plot to its predetermined end.

I wish there were a polite way to ask the author if she could go back to just before it went off the rails and rewrite the second half with the same style and sensibility as the first.

That's too bad, Matt, because that really can ruin an otherwise decent story. I've gotten 20 chapters into a 30 chapter serial and given up in a WTF that way, too. It reaaly sucks. Almost more than an unfinished story. Unfinished stories you can at least imagine how it might end without being radically disabused. Something already finished just pokes at you and keeps tearing the scab off every time you go back to see if it really is that bad.

Fortunately for my fic, I think I've got a pretty decent beta reader, who would never dare let me get away with that.

And I want to thank 'Suela for sticking up for those of us who can't focus on two things at the same time while listening. Either music or talking, but not both at the same time, thank you very much. Intro music, OTOH, is tres cool. It can really set the mood of story and I'm willing to bet Fay chooses really cool music.

Yeah, the podfic of Fay's that I've listened to has tended to have short clips of music (not whole songs) that do a very good job of setting a tone or a mood. I think it's a great add. Music, especially with lyrics, in the background of the reading would be a totally different story.

Fay, as amych said. While I think it's a subjectivity issue with regards to the use of music for interludes and lead-ins (i.e., some people like it, some don't, for some it depends on the music choices, just like vids), my primary issue was with people reading over music. I am an absolutist on that: it's a failure of accessibility, and a disservice to both the story and many of the potential audience members.

On a personal note, I don't like entire songs used as interludes. I want to get to the next part of the story, already, not wait through Johnny Cash singing about Folsom Prison or whatever. But that's not an accessibility issue, it's a personal preference and a formatting aspect. (I do wish people would label the stories when they use entire songs, though.)

In either event, it's my understanding it's not that hard to not use music when putting together podfic, and those of us with hearing problems would like to have the option of listening to a music-free story.