It’s one thing to write music; it’s quite another to write about music. Relying too heavily on visuals when writing description is an easy trap to fall into for many of us writers, and never does it come back to bite us harder than when we find ourselves trying to describe something as elusive, invisible, and emotionally potent as music.
So we close our eyes and imagine how the music sounds. That’s a great first step. But in some cases—particularly if the music in question is an integral part of the scene or story you’re writing—even that may not be enough. Without the benefit of actual audio to convey it, your music may fall on deaf ears (so to speak) unless you go the extra mile to really describe not just how it sounds, but how it feels. Which is why, when writing about music, it’s important to occasionally consider how to describe songs using other senses.
Writing About Music Visually
All right, I know I started off with a reminder that we can’t always rely on sight alone to get us through a descriptive passage—but hear me out. When describing something invisible like a melody, describing it through a visual metaphor or association can give it weight, both for your readers and your characters.
Example: When I hear the song “Ar Éirinn Ní Neosfainn Cé Hí” (“For Ireland, I’d Not Tell Her Name”) by Dervish, it sounds like Ireland to me—or at least the fantasy of the Emerald Isle’s countryside I’ve held in my head all these years. When that song plays, all I have to do is close my eyes to see rolling green hills, sharp cliffs by the sea, and dirt and cobbled paths meandering through old villages and older ruins of castles long gone. At the same time, it feels like home—a comforting place, a little sorrow hiding in the corners with the dust bunnies (because what home hasn’t been a place of loss as well as living?) but warm and welcoming nonetheless. It’s not just a song to me—it’s a shelter from the storm.
Describing Musical Flavors
Just as there are flavors of food, music comes in all sorts of flavors as well. It might be sweet, it might be bitter, it might be like nothing you (or your characters) have ever sampled before, sprinkled with foreign spices from distant lands. It might taste sour on the singer’s tongue, or might leave listeners with a bad aftertaste. But it does have a taste.
Example: “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer will forever taste like sugar cookies to me. It might be because it’s a sweet little song without much weight to it, light but enjoyable. Or it might be because when I was a little girl, I used to go to Publix every week with my mom to get groceries. It was the 90’s, which meant certain songs would come on the store radio every single time we went without fail—and one of those was “Kiss Me,” which I did not mind because even then, I liked it a lot. I also, like many children, enjoyed cookies—so my mom would buy me two cookies of my choice from the special bakery section as a treat. One was almost always a sugar cookie with tiny rainbow sprinkles. To this day, hearing Sixpence None the Richer makes me instantly crave one of those cookies. Conversely, when I finally gave into that craving last week and bought one, the taste instantly brought the song—and the memories that went with both—to the top of my mind. For a moment, I was a little girl again, all because of a song and a cookie.
Developing Musical Scents
Some music lends itself rather obviously to scent-based description. Consider grunge—I don’t know about you, but to me, grunge smells like sweat and musty garages and a hint of smoke. (In the best possible way. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” anyone?) Smell and memories are closely linked, and often, if a song reminds us of a place, we might remember not just how that place looked, but how it smells. Or, the song itself might conjure certain olfactory sensations.
Example: As someone with an increasingly poor sense of smell, not a long of songs spring to mind for this particular sense. However, I do have one example—“The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole, which my dad played (and continues to play) every holiday season. While there is an obvious olfactory reference right at the beginning of the song (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”), I sadly have never had that particular experience. So instead of roasting chestnuts, what I smell every time I hear that song is the particular perfume of my family’s Christmas traditions: homemade bread fresh out of the oven and slathered in butter, roasting turkey and store-bought stuffing, cinnamon candles, and fresh pine needles. It doesn’t matter what season it is outside when I hear it; if that song is playing, it’s Christmas time.
Music as a Physical or Tactile Experience
Music can heal or it can hurt. The right melody can calm a frantic mind and soothe anxiety and depression, slowing your pulse and racing thoughts alike—but on the opposite end of the spectrum, some songs are meant to make you move, to get your heart racing and your blood pumping. And of course, any song turned up too loud can be agony-inducing—an invisible torturer causing real, physical pain. But music can have subtler somatosensory connotations as well. A singer’s voice can be velvety or rough like tree bark. Banging drums can send vibrations through your very bones, even your heart. A serenade can feel like a caress or can send chills down your spine, depending on the deliverer.
Example: It’s a bit obvious, but whenever I listen to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, I really do feel (or imagine I feel) seaspray on my face and the wind in my hair. I may have been a pirate in a previous life, but more likely, I’m drawing on childhood memories of the beach and of the various times I’ve stood on the deck of a boat and thought, “Yo ho, yo ho…” I love the ocean and I love exploring; it only makes sense that the soundtrack to a pirate movie immediately pulls me back to times and places where I not only thought I was on the brink of an adventure—I could feel it in my bones and in the shifting of the tide.
Considering Other Perspectives: Synesthesia
Something else to consider when writing about music is the neurological phenomenon known as “synesthesia.” As Psychology Today aptly describes it, synesthesia is “when one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time.” For example, synesthetes may experience music as not only an auditory experience, but also a visual, olfactory, physical, or gustatory one. Synesthesia may involve any combination of unrelated sensory experiences, and people with it may have more than one subtype. As one synesthete explains,
“Synesthetes … may see sounds, taste words or feel a sensation on their skin when they smell certain scents. They may also see abstract concepts like time projected in the space around them, like the image on the right.
Many synesthetes experience more than one form of the condition. For example, my friend and I both have grapheme-color synesthesia — numbers and letters trigger a color experience, even though my experience differs from hers.
Because her numbers have personalities, she also has a form of synesthesia known as ordinal-linguistic personification.”
While not everyone experiences synesthesia and it is not technically a sixth sense, it is an intriguing topic and an excellent reminder that not everyone experiences even seemingly “basic” elements of the human experience in the same way.
Likewise, characters in a story may hear the same song at the same time and yet experience it in completely different ways. One may be comforted and think of home; another may be reminded of a traumatic experience that occurred while the song was playing and feel anxious; another still may be a synesthete for whom the music paints a beautiful abstract picture; and yet another may be deaf and unable to hear the song, but enjoys the visuals of a live concert or the feeling of the music’s vibrations through the floor.
Writing About Music Effectively
Music is often relegated to a background role in literary storytelling. Yet even when music is not the centerpiece of the plot, it can still play a major role in setting the scene, developing characters, and establishing the overall atmosphere of a story or novel.
What would The Lord of the Rings be without the cheery drinking songs of the Hobbits, haunting Elvish laments, and Tom Bombadil’s charmed devil-may-care ditties? In Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series, musical bells are used as magical tools to summon and control the dead–each bell has a distinct voice and personality, so much so that they are elevated from mere plot devices to supporting cast. And in The Name of the Wind, music plays such an integral role that mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda has been brought onto the team adapting the Kingkiller Chronicles for TV just to ensure the soundscape of the adaptation will be on point.
They say the job of a writer is to paint a picture in the reader’s mind, but that’s just one aspect of storytelling. Our real job is far more complicated: we must create a world that not only looks, but smells, sounds, tastes, and feels compelling. Never let the obvious answer trap your imagination, whether you’re writing about music or any other supposedly singular sensory experience. No human experience is objective, no experience happens the same way twice, and no two humans can have exactly the same experience. Write accordingly.
