Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of "Books That Sing" by Justin St. Clair

The aspect of sound has become increasingly relevant to consider in studies of books and literature as the world of books is adjusting to a "turn towards audio." Audiobooks have become more popular than ever before, and consequently we see increasing experimentation with sound in books: books that include music and sound effects are becoming mainstream, and new hybrid formats are emerging. This development has resulted in new scholarly attention toward an otherwise overlooked perspective, namely the dynamics between sound and text, or more specifically, between books and music.

The timing thus seems perfect for Justin St. Clair's Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age. While most research in the field centers on audiobooks (e.g., Matthew Rubery, Iben Have, and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen), St. Clair focuses on the subgenre of soundtracked books, defined as "a book (a physical print publication, or its digital analogue) for which a musical soundtrack has been produced" (p. 1). The result is a specific hybridity, "the visuality of narrative print media coupled with the aurality of musical sound recordings" (p. 1), which makes the form interesting, according to St. Clair. Departing from Murray Schafer's much-debated notion of "schizo" analysis, he introduces the concept of "schizotemporality," signifying a split between the readtime of the text and the runtime of the musical recording, and he demonstrates how this aspect defines uses of soundtracked books throughout the last century.

Focusing on the subgenre results in what St. Clair calls an "idiosyncratic trip through a hundred years of media history" (p. 1). While the project might seem idiosyncratic, with a selection of more or less eccentric case studies from children's "Bubble Books" to New Age sci-fi novels, it does result in a convincing piece of media history, presenting a development from educational to literary uses of the sound-text combination. The former tendency is demonstrated in case studies of the Bubble Books series, early twentieth-century children's books published with miniature records (ch. 1), and a study of musical ethnographies and midcentury exotica, focusing on the Columbia Legacy Collection (1954–72; ch. 2). Combining close readings with rich contextualizations, St. Clair demonstrates how these examples reflect uses of the singing book to illustrate established myths and conventions: retelling fairytales in the case of the Bubble Books and confirming ethnic stereotypes in the Legacy Collection.

The second half of the book turns toward literary experiments, focusing on Michael Nesmith's The Prison (1974), L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth (1982), and Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985; ch. 3). An expert in postmodern literature, St. Clair here notes a connection between the "schizotemporality" of the soundtracked novel and "a series of epistemological crises playing out in contemporary culture" (p. 10). The turn toward the literary becomes associated with a turn toward participation: involving readers in interpreting the sound-text relation and thus moving away from uses of the format to merely illustrate and educate. This tendency culminates when St. Clair turns to the digital age, focusing among other things on Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves (2000), which is declared the "highwater mark" of the soundtracked novel (p. 10). Emphasis here is on the online communities surrounding the work and their role in interpreting its relation to its "soundtrack," the album Haunted by Poe. The analysis reveals a strong optimism regarding the opportunity for participation in the digital age. St. Clair does touch on other aspects, including attempts to capitalize on the soundtracked book, as in his discussion in the afterword on the start-up BookTrack (2011), which produces synchronized soundtracks to ebooks; however, his emphasis is clearly on the potential in literary experiment and participatory culture.

While the optimism can be debated, Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age does deliver a strong analysis of a niche phenomenon in modern media history. The analyses could be strengthened by paying closer attention to the interplay between sound and text, using perspectives from studies in transmedial or multimodal storytelling and audio narratology. Instead, the book's strength lies in its attention to contexts and historical detail—as the author proclaims, "The fun bits are buried in the endnotes" (p. 7). The book should be read for these details and because it contributes a much-needed historical perspective to relations between books and sound in a time when the aspect of sound in books cannot be ignored.