Making Mind Music by James Hanback, Jr.

I read an article about a New York company, BookTrack, that is developing eBooks with soundtracks. The principle is essentially the same as that of watching a movie or playing a video game: the soundtrack enhances the emotion you feel as the scene plays out in your head. Given the Web-like capabilities of eBook technology, it is perhaps a natural evolution of the platform as long as you're not too ADD to become distracted by it.

Alas, I must admit to being of the distracted temperament when it comes to reading fiction. Unless I can fully immerse my imagination in the world you've created I will lose interest. It could be the simple fact that reading and comprehension requires more brainpower than watching a film or physically reacting to the twists and turns of a gaming environment. It could also be that it's just how I'm wired.

The perplexing thing is that I actually require a soundtrack when I write or when I edit another writer's work. If the music is right, the scenes flow naturally and with minimal effort from my imagination to my fingertips. Likewise, the appropriate music for a given genre actually seems to aid my machine-like progress through the character development, plot development, and grammatical correction process of an editing project.

Recently I edited a 160,000-word historical romance epic set in the Depression and World War II eras of Nashville, Tennessee. Most of my work on that piece was conducted in accompaniment to the Delta Bluesy strum of an acoustic guitar or the distinctive twang of a steel guitar. I would have chosen something different had the setting been Victorian Transylvania. Swan Lake or Wojciech Kilar, perhaps.

Then there's the new story I wrote back in February: a gory and gross piece of murderous men's room horror. It's only a short story--and it's still looking for an appropriate home--but I needed a specific range of background music to make it go where I wanted it to go. It started with Robert Plant's "Ship of Fools." That song was the perfect emotional compliment to the story's first scene, which mainly describes a contentious family road trip in an SUV (the ship of fools). Next came the haunting Johnny Cash cover of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "I See a Darkness." That song pretty much defined the second of the story's three major scenes. Finally, the climactic and ending scenes were pounded out to the sound of Meat Loaf belting "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)." A strange choice given the first two? Possibly. But you must understand that much of the horror in a horror story spawns from absurdity.

Maybe reading an eBook that includes a soundtrack wouldn't be as distracting as I think. We live in a distracted age, after all, and reading a work of fiction while you listen to music, check Twitter, or post a status update to Facebook might soon become as normal as sending text messages and posting updates while you stand in the checkout line at the grocery store.

I'm not the only one who does that, right?

Right?