Find the Perfect Soundtrack for Any Book
When I read genre fiction, I like to immerse myself in the world of a fairy tale. I often play early music or a suitable soundtrack. In Hilary Mantel’s Tudor literary drama Wolf Hall, I spent over an hour thoroughly researching pre-Elizabethan folk and choral music. I finally found a simpler and less distracting solution.
The Ambient Mixer contains 57,000 surround mixes with nearly 10,000 looped samples. Many of them are based on certain fictional conditions, such as the Shire , Night Valley , the night shift on the Death Star, and the common rooms of all four Hogwarts houses: Slytherin , Hufflepuff , Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor . (Ravenclaw has unearthly music; Hufflepuff has a purring cat.)
The organization of the site is confusing and the huge collection includes a lot of useless stuff. To find the right vibe, your best bet is to search across multiple terms, find a few mixes that roughly match what you want, and click on the tags at the bottom.
Searching for “Wolf Hall” did not give me anything suitable, so I searched for “Tudor” for a mixture of Tudor cuisine , “king” for the Royal Chambers , Medieval Throne Room and ” Teaching with Merlin” , “Shakespeare” for the writing table and Shakespeare’s feast. … Scene “royal” for the Court and the Royal Study (perfect for allusions to Sir Thomas Cromwell’s children) and “Renaissance” for the Renaissance Castle and the Renaissance Tavern . Clicking on the tags gave me (spoiler!) Some decapitating atmosphere from The Hangman and Dramatic Medieval Execution .
The last mix was too dramatic, but like every mix on the site, it was customizable. I just made the screams of agony less frequent and I was in tune. If I’m not careful, I might be able to spend more time tweaking my soundscape than listening to it. I still prefer this than be content with anunchanging 10 hour YouTubemix .
Ambient Mixer is also available for iOS ( paid and free ) and Android ( paid and free ), although these mobile versions have not been updated since 2014. However, they are useful for reading in the park or in the library, or for bringing some specific vibe to your next round of even the most obscure board RPG.