Adapting Books to Music
- Henry Atkins
- Oct 22, 2017
- 1 min read
Some people would probably point out that Radio and Music are one in the same. They're not in this context. Radio deals more with Podcasts, Audio Books and Voices in general.
Music is... well... music. Songs and Singing.
There has been book adaptations in music before. The best example I can think of is 'War of the Worlds'.

Songs, Futuristic sounds and a Sci-Fi Story from the 19th century.
(It's definitely worth listening to by the way).
The representation problem comes back again, of course, since the sounds used to illustrate the apocalyptic, sci-fi atmosphere is what the musician would have imagined and composed himself. I enjoy it but someone else might think some sounds or creative decisions might not of been appropriate or they didn't like it at all.
The way Jeff Wayne did this fantastic adaptation is by essentially taking exerts from the book and reciting some of them chapter by chapter for each song while playing sounds to help paint the picture of what's happening all the while including lyrics and music to make the playing song more like a song than a play-by-play audio book
3 Chapters in and the theme of Book representations is clear. Books in every way, except for the direction of the story (excluding RPG books that only partly fills that gap), gives total freedom to each and every reader an original design of the world and its inhabitants. Any representation of a book will steal that freedom.
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