I’ve been test driving Booktrack on my ipad – a free app marketed as a revolutionary new reading / listening experience.
How it works is that selected titles are downloaded to your chosen device complete with a built in synchronized soundtrack. You can set specially composed music to play at the same pace as your reading speed.
The website assures us that “Unlike listening to random music, this music is scored to accompany the text and make sense to the story, helping to further the imagination and the story telling. The sound does not take away from the reading experience; it enhances it”.
I sampled the whole of The Ugly Duckling and the preview copies of stories by Salman Rushdie and Edgar Allan Poe.
The ‘sound designers’ combine ambient effects and field recordings like quacks and gunfire for Hans Christian Anderson’s tale. Initially it felt quite distracting but it is quite cleverly done and by no means as kitschy as it sounds. The site is clean, well designed and easy to navigate.
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There’s a case to be made for nominating Sherlock Holmes as the first true superhero. His costume may not have been as silly or sexy but he made up for this with his awesome powers of perception.
