Have you tried listening to series-specific music while reading manga?

I'm currently reading Neon Genesis Evangelion and wanted to attempt this because there's a lot of overlap with the tv series allowing to cue specific tracks as they happened in the anime. I found the emotional response to be significantly greater, the soundtrack is very moving so it could only add to those moments. Surprisingly, it even felt as if I was watching the series rather than reading something. The spur of the soundtrack probably made me adjust panel pacing to coincide with how the music directed the animation. In contrast some of the parts that I had gone through without the soundtrack felt more stale than what the show had. I only did this for significant moments, knowing what tracks had to be played, so mostly battle scenes and self-analysis segments. I guess if there was some generic ambience this could also be applied to less symbolic parts of the story, leading to while no a bigger impact but simply more immersion. There's no such material in the Evangelion albums however. One thing to note is that the volume at which the music gets played should definitely be lower than at what one usually listens music to, it's too distracting otherwise.

Evidently in most cases this is not an option. But in my experience playing unrelated music doesn't cut it, the emotional tone requires appropriate material and not something that randomly finds its way to the ear. In the end I appreciate the immersion gained and emotional impact received. I'll continue reading NGE manga this way. It's what I'm after.

The experience also got me thinking about how this could be streamlined and made less interruptive. Most of the issues crop up due to music overextending the scenes which makes for a less than perfect experience. It would probably be more appropriate if the music faded in relation to page numbers viewed or transitioned to other sounds that are relevant to later pages. Sometimes the compositions don't quite line up with important panels. Due to unpredictable reading behaviour this is unavoidable and can only be minimized by playing music which isn't arranged to elicit severely specific moments. Soundtrack ending before the end of a segment should probably be kept looping.
Technically the solution could be as simple as having metadata file packaged along with audio tracks and manga pages, detailing at which page spreads specific tracks should be cued. A comic reader application would then have to only mix the tracks and follow the cue file.

Would love to hear other opinions on this as I can't find anyone sharing similar experiences on the net.

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2 Anonymous 2019-01-25T04:05:17 [ImgOps] [iqdb] File: Personification.full.2463540.j… (JPEG, 198.4 KB, 1024x640) It could work theoretically, but it sure sounds like a complicated thing to set up per file, and you wouldn't really be able to come up with something which sits well with every person. I think the ideal would be to have a series of standard "profile" names (e.g. "Calm", "Battle", "Sad") along with maybe a few more particular sound effect profiles ("Swords clanging", "Running", "Harsh wind"), and the reader can look at the metadata file to choose what sorts of sounds and playlists to choose from for each page. From there, you can add more advanced controls like fadeouts, speed, or volume adjustments. A big issue in the way of a system like this is that you can't just pass these files around by theirselves and tell people to add them to their archives if they like. Some scans like to cut out the first white page, or put a credits page at the end of every chapter, or join every single fucking page and have this awkward huge wide gap inbetween the panels which you can tell wasn't actually there originally (fuck, I hate JJCAT), and the numbering index would just be thrown off entirely. I guess you could distribute versions especially for every group's scans, but even to a very dedicated group, something like that would get tiring fast. Plus, given that it'd just seem like an annoying gimmick to a significant amount of people, it just wouldn't be adopted. One thing you've got to realise about the common comic book archive is that is has no metadata at all. I think some readers have the capability to display TL notes if it's attached in a file, but that's it. They're so severely limited that there isn't even any kind of metadata to say that any image is a part of a two-page span. What actually happens is that the reader checks the aspect ratio of the image, and if it's more wide than long, then it's treated as a "double page" which'll be used to override whatever number of images you're reading at the moment. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even check the filename. For a while I thought something like a reader that can "hot patch" a scanlation over a copy of a raw manga while you're reading could be nice, but something like that just isn't going to happen as long as people keep using Honeyview and fucking PDF readers for their comics. Don't take it the wrong way, but doesn't the ordinary adventure game/visual novel already suit this criteria? Though I guess your idea is to improve comics that already exist, and not just start writing your own NGE fan VNs.