It seems that novels can be sheet music

When I began learning to write fiction, I was frustrated that the art I knew about - mainly music, but painting and movies too - had maths in it.

I liked that in music there were harmonies and rhythms and all these maths things that made you feel something. This seemed magic. I got the same feeling from books - the magic thing - and though I read loads of theory, I couldn’t find anything that told me: here is the underlying maths of the novel.

Out of frustration, I made enormous spreadsheet diagrams of all my favourite books. I wanted to find something that felt like it should be there.

Down the left of the spreadsheet I would write the page number, and across the top of the spreadsheet I would write when something important happened: a character appearing, an interesting phrase recurring, a location, a theme, etc. Then I would fill in the little boxes.

I thought maybe I could find patterns, or commonalities, or you know, anything that might help me understand the actual mechanical craft of structuring a novel, if indeed such a thing existed.

(When I wrote Brat, my first book, I structured it against my map of Gatsby, which is one of my most favourite books, right down to the word count.)

this is a very simplified diagram of Brat - I’d like the Goodreads reviewers who complained about the plotting to note the four extremely clear gaps. It’s a MATHEMATICALLY PERFECT five act structure, you utter philistines

Recently I have been rather unwell, and the repetitive task of mapping out novels has been a nice way to distract myself from myself.

Simultaneously, in the promotion cycle for Brat, I found myself talking repeatedly in interviews about the parallels that might exist between novels and sheet music. People seemed interested (or, at least, people were being paid to seem interested) and I promised to explain it more.

In the last couple of years, I’ve also learned more about computers, and how to program computer programs, and this meant that I could see what happened if I tried to use my book diagrams as a new form of sheet music.

The results are rather beautiful, I think - I’ll show you later. First I will explain how it actually works.

before that, the important thing

The really important thing to me in this process was for nothing to be ‘chosen’ by me, or anyone else. I didn’t want any creative input at all. I wanted all the sounds to ‘come from’ the book, and only the book.

I didn’t want to make ‘music inspired by a book’, I wanted to reveal the music that was already within a book.

how it actually works

First, I take a digital version of a book and look for the 100 most-used ‘important’ words. This is faster and produces broadly the same results as manually going through it myself, marking these down into my stupid spreadsheets.

This also means I’m not ‘interpreting’ it in any way.

Then I run a ‘sentiment analysis’ of those words, which decides whether those words are broadly happy, or broadly sad. This decides whether to use a major or minor key for the whole piece of music that the book creates.

After this, I turn the book into segments. I chose 60,000 words as the ‘standard length’ of a book (generally I prefer shorter novels), and 6 minutes for the ‘standard length’ of the piece of music. I decided that 6 minutes would equal 100 ‘segments’ of a book. Shorter books produce shorter pieces of music. Longer books produce longer pieces of music.

(I can’t remember, now, how many bars of music a ‘segment’ equates to).

Then I look at what words appear in each segment.

Each word is assigned a sonic quality. This is based mostly on its ‘phonemes’ - which means the sounds that make up a word. Big open vowels back more open sounds, harsh words make harsher sounds. There are some other phoneme types, too (each word has loads) which define its placement within the scale.

Then how often that word is used in its book segment defines how many times it appears in the musical segment. So lots of uses of ‘fuck’ would sound like lots of quick, spat-out ffkk notes. And one use of ‘love’ would sound like a sound like a beautiful, open, oooevv sound.

Would they harmonise?

the music books can make

Once I work out how to do it, I will put the tool on the internet, so you can put any book you like into it and hear how it sounds. Subscribe to this if you want to be told when that is available.

For now, here are some really interesting examples.

I’ve used a selection of books that differ really wildly in structural terms.

Pay particular ending to each piece of music. The structural switches in early acts are harder to pick out, sometimes, but the endings are often strikingly resolved.

the great gatsby - f. scott fitzgerald

one of my faves, had to do it. so we beat on…

white noise - don delillo

total suburban dylar vibes to this one. The whole thing goes deathwards…

the vegetarian - han kang

the resolution to this piece is as terrifying as in the novel to me

ice - anna kavan

this one sounds SOOOOO much like the book

catcher in the rye - salinger

you can literally hear Holden’s language and worldview change (esp in the carousel segment at the end the novel). this one amazed me. Salinger is underrated

intermezzo - sally rooney

obligatory (also i adore her writing, best novelist working - listen to the complexity)

brat - gabriel smith

i hadn’t quite worked out the method when I made this one, so it differs a bit, but same general idea

i’m going to release an album length version of this to fuck with charli xcx’s SEO

any requests / future plans for this

Subscribe and I’ll put the tool online when I work out how to do that, and you’ll be able to generate music from words yourself. In the meantime, just let me know if you want me to post some other books.

I guess in terms of progressing this, I’d like to mess around with the BPM of each piece, the instruments that do the synthesising, etc. The tough part is not bring any of my ‘own creativity’ to it - I really really want the music to come from the book and nothing but the book. I want to minimise how many choices I make.

It’d be cool to do a zoomed-in, symphony length project, too. That would be interesting. To hear every word as a note.

The visuals of the videos, btw, is the diagram of the novel’s structure that I created. I added them because I thought they were nice to look at.

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I spend a lot of time doing fun stuff like this - I’m going to use this as somewhere to put those projects, rather than writing, (although maybe some writing too, not sure yet) so follow me etc if you want to play with more fun book/art/music toys like this :-)

All my love, sorry if I owe you an email and I’ve been doing this instead,
Gabe