App adds tailor-made music and images to books

A new app synchronises specially-composed music to books to match content and reading speed.

The creators of Bubo have designed a platform that adds tailor-made illustrations and music to ebooks for a completely seemless, immersive reading experience. Bubo is designed to work with phone and tablet e-readers to provide synchronised music to the story, as well as to the reading speed of individual readers. The music is composed to match the mood of each part of the story, to “help the book speak for itself and magnify its emotional core”. It gets progressively slower or faster, changing melodies and instrumentation as the story unfolds. The aim of Bubo is to use the images and music to make reading a more captivating and enthralling experience.

Bubo began in Switzerland in 2015, and began private Beta testing with ten sample books the following year. Currently, the start-up is offering a free Android app and two ebooks to anyone who wishes to participate in the public Beta trial by giving feedback. No date has been set for the official launch. Bubo are also finalists at the MassChallenge Switzerland accelerator program, one of the biggest and most startup friendly accelerators in the world.

This is not the first time that a start-up has been launched to try and add value to the reading experience. We have previously written about innovations such as wallpaper that can be scanned to tell a story and a smartphone projector that aims to bring e-readers to life. However, Bubo is the first time anyone has attempted to synchronize custom-composed music and images to existing texts. Will people prefer this to reading in silence?