Sound Track

what's playing?

As Aomame stews impatiently in the back of a cab stuck in traffic at the beginning of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, Janáček’s “Sinfonietta” plays on the car radio. This piece of music becomes an important recurring theme throughout the book.

For this prompt, play around with including a musical sound track to a scene — not the sort of music-from-a-movie-score that might have been written to illuminate a scene’s mood or action, but an actual song that is being played or sung in real time in the scene. It might have been chosen by any of your characters or be a feature of the public space they’re inhabiting, say “Happy Birthday” at a child’s (or an old woman’s?) party, “Uncle John’s Band” played by a bunch of teenagers on a record player in a smoke-filled rec room in 1970s suburbia, or the Muzak version of “Lara’s Theme” infecting the sterile cube of a high rise office building's elevator.

Including song lyrics can be complicated (and expensive) in terms of rights, so if the song is in copyright, focus on details like instrumentation, the timbre of the voice or instruments, the tempo, the static from the fuzz on the needle, speaker distortion, or possibly a paraphrase of the lyrics, rather than directly quoting them. It's not easy to describe the sound of musical instruments without resorting to clichés, so be aware that pitfall, and take your time with this one.