Scoring a Novel
The Chain has a soundtrack. Well, actually three now.
There is one song for each of its forty-two chapters, in three versions. The main one is the album. A heavier one runs the story the way it sounds from inside its protagonist. A third is instrumental, meant to sit under the words while you read.
The songs were chosen by feel, which is the ordinary way to do it and not the interesting part. Being a computer scientist and a bit crazy, I wanted to measure whether the playlist feeling matched the feeling of the book.
I had, of course, already built a tool to try to figure out the feeling of each chapter. It reads a scene and tracks what an AI model thinks about a character, how much danger there is, whether the thing the characters were dreading has happened yet, and it lets those values rise and fade over time. Since I have invented all the characters and have my own strong views of them, I wanted a tool to get a better picture of how a reader experienced the characters. Whether I had gotten my ideas across.
Now I pointed this tool at the playlist.
A song carries the same raw material a scene does, some tension, some release, a general feeling. I ran each track through the model and set its curve beside the book's, chapter by chapter. They lined up better than I had expected. The menace in the music rises and falls almost exactly where the menace in the book does.
It also caught some mistakes. One song grieved harder than its chapter, because I had scored the surface of the scene and missed its actual weight. One triumphant track sat over a chapter the model still read as afraid underneath. Some of these I changed. Some I kept.
Then the model told me something I had not gone looking for. Music on its own, with no story around it, barely moved the needle, because there was no one to care about. The feelings that need a person to fear for, the dread and grief and relief, appeared only when I gave the same music to a reader who was already carrying the book's state into the chapter. The song does not create the feeling on its own. It amplifies the feeling the story has already built.
One problem is that each song is just a couple of minutes and a chapter usually takes longer to read. So I built a Spotify app that plays related music with the right mood while you read a chapter, then when you get to the next chapter you click a link and get music for that chapter. It is here: Reading Mode. It will ask to connect your Spotify, and the chapter links work without an account if you would rather not.
The music was not meant to stand alone.
Played on its own, with no book around it, the model barely felt anything across all forty-two tracks. Curiosity, a little suspense, no dread anywhere. All the fear in that playlist is borrowed from people you have not met yet.
If you want to test that, chapter one is Radiohead's Burn the Witch. Put it on, read the first page, and see whether the strings are doing the work or the book is.