Show HN: Book to Classical Music Soundtrack
illuminovel.comHey, HN,
literature and classical music are two of my biggest passions, and I always found it interesting how some classical pieces fit to the stories they are barely connected with.
E.g. some of Tchaikovsky's music will always evoke the world of Harry Potter for me; music of Sibelius takes me to the same landscapes as writings of Tolkien - of course, these clearly result from John Williams' and Howard Shore's direct inspirations from the romantic composers when creating the soundtracks for the movie adaptations. For a more niche example, music of Olivier Messiaen fits in my view the book L'Écume Des Jours by Boris Vian - grandiose movements of the Turangalila symphony for the first half of the story, the expressionism and sadness of Vingt Regards the latter. The examples are numerous.
My recent idea was to somehow automate this pairing of literature and music. It works quite simply - at first, I collected a large dataset of classical music pieces with text descriptions, which I transformed into embeddings. When generating a soundtrack, I use an LLM to create a description of what kind of music would be suitable for the story, and the embedding of this description is used to fetch the most relevant tracks.
While the resulting playlist can barely be understood as "soundtrack" at this point, it can be a pleasant background playlist for reading the book.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or feedback :)
Have you considered incorporating user feedback/ratings to fine-tune the LLM's soundtrack suggestions over time? Could help improve accuracy, especially for lesser-known books?
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I thought about something like that - I want to create a subpage for every playlist where users will be able to upvote or downvote specific tracks. I also plan to add option to upvote the whole playlist, to get an idea which ones are popular.