Reinventing Reading: Paul Cameron at TEDxAuckland

A crisis: a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. We all regularly hear about problems with literacy, getting people to learn to read. But I think there's an even bigger problem than that, and that is there are a large number of people who know how to read but are now choosing not to read. In the United States, 33% of high school graduates and 42% of college graduates never read another book in their lifetime after graduation. And in the UK now, children are more likely to own a mobile phone than a book. Because we all know that these video games and books are amazing, but would you be as proud if your 10-year-old son or daughter came to you and said, 'I've just finished reading a 300-page novel'? How proud would you be then if they came to you and said, 'I've just finished playing the video game based on the book' or 'watched the movie based on the book'? Because the reality is these new entertainment experiences are amazing. They've got multi-billion dollar budgets, and it's just very hard for reading to compete with them. But on the other hand, we know that there's something special about reading, because when we read, we can really get lost in a good book. So today, what I want to do is have a look at how we can transport you to different worlds. The way I like to explain it, and it's very unscientific, is reading accesses something called the inner imagination of your mind. And it's only through reading that we can get there. Almost no other entertainment medium can do the same thing, because when we read, we have to create it for ourselves in our own mind. And it changes for everybody, depending on how long it takes us to get into the state of mind. For some, it can be reading a line, others a chapter. It depends if you're in a busy or quiet environment, or the text might be very hard, or maybe you've just had a really, really tough day and you're not in the right state of mind. So our research next focused on what else could we look at that has a similar emotional response on our brains, in the same way when we read we access this inner imagination of the mind. And the answer, when we looked at it, was obvious, especially for younger people, and that was music. Because music evokes emotion in our brains like nothing else. The best example for this is a film. If you think about it, when you're watching a film, if you hear music like this, you're instantly going to think suspense. And now it's sadness. How often have you been driving in the car somewhere and you hear a song come on the radio, and it instantly transports you back to your teenage years? All of those emotions and memories come flooding back to you. That's the power of music. Or if you give an adult or a child a page of text and ask them to memorize it and then read it back to you in 10 minutes' time, few will be able to do it. But if you give them text like this and a song that goes with it, and I'm sure many of you are familiar with this song, they could recite it back to you in 5 or 10 minutes easily. And if I remove this text from the screen now, I'm pretty sure almost everybody in this audience could sit down and write out the words, because that's the impact that music has on our memory and our emotional engagement. So our second main point we've got to consider with reading is that if we go back 10,000 years ago, stories used to be handed down from generation to generation around the campfire. The book as we know it today is only about 2,000 years old. Yet in the last 100 years, storytelling has had a massive disruptive change. It started out with the advent of radio, then black and white film, then we added sound, color, and now we're up to 3D, and who knows what's next. Reading, meanwhile, distribution has changed enormously. We can now carry an entire library around in our back pocket on our mobile phone. But yet, the way we read 2,000 years ago on paper to the way we read today on a tablet or a phone has not changed. The medium may have changed, but the experience hasn't. In the United States in 2009, 80% of US families did not buy a book. But what's even more concerning, and we've seen this pattern emerge all around the world now, is children are turned off reading for pleasure by the time they're leaving primary school. So they get to 10, 11 years old and they're checking out from reading. They've had enough. And I really think that's a massive problem for society, something that we really need to address, and we need some real answers. So what was seen as the savior for all of this was actually books going electronic. We now had tablets and devices that we could now bring this multimedia world into reading. And in an area called enhanced books, it has been a spectacular failure. And the reason is, when you read a book, you get into this deeper level imagination of the mind state, and then what you have to do is come out of that to watch that video or play that game, and then get back into that to enjoy reading again. And it amounts to just one word, and that is distraction. So the third and final part we have to bring to reading is make sure it provides immersion and not distraction from reading. So if we look at our checklist, how does reading compete with this modern multimedia and sensory world we live in today? We have to access the inner imagination, we have to bring more emotional engagement, and we have to provide immersion in the reading experience. What you're reading when you're reading, and adapts the soundtrack to match. If you're reading about a scene, it will create the environmental sounds for the scene you're reading. It'll produce the sound effects that match the events happening in the scene, and then it will bring music in that brings emotion to the experience. And the core part about the technology is it's a bit like having a composer arrange the perfect soundtrack to match what you're reading when you read the book. So I'll just give you an example. If you're reading about a book and it's a scene and it's on the beach, this is what you'd hear. And you're reading that the heroine is running along the beach, and then all of a sudden from out of the shadows a man appears with a gun and fires the gun. It's very sad now because the heroine was dying, so the sad music comes in. I think it's a really good name for what we are creating, which is a new genre of digital entertainment content. What I'd like to do now is just show you an example of this. This is a book that we did called 'In the South,' a book by Salman Rushdie. The score for the book was composed by New Zealand renowned composer John Psathas, who's in the audience today. It was recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and all the sound was produced and mixed at Park Road Post Productions, the same company that brought us 'Lord of the Rings' sound and other famous movies. I'm just going to give you a little demo and talk through it, and then I'll give you an example you can look at for yourself. So what you can see on the screen here is it just looks like a normal e-reader. The main difference is you're hearing sound, and you can see on the right-hand side there's a little icon. You can just double-click on a word, and the soundtrack will automatically synchronize back in with whatever part of the book you're reading. You can also adjust the mix of the soundtrack. So if you think, 'I like it but the music's too loud for me,' you can turn it down, or you can bring the music up and drop the ambient sound down. The core part of our technology is matching to the way you are reading, with your reading speed to the soundtrack as you are reading. And what I'd like to do now is just play for you about 45 seconds of an example from the same book. In the scene, it's a scene when the tsunami is hitting the coastline, and it is set at a set reading speed, so it's not going to match to your individual reading speeds, but you can see from the triangle down the side, you know where an average reader is. So if you look at that soundtrack now and marry that up with our criteria that I came up with, that is we need to access the inner imagination of the mind. It blocks out the outside world. It enables them to focus on their book, get into the book quicker, and stay there longer. So it's solving one of the problems to get into that inner imagination of the mind state. And the other point is it brings more emotional engagement. I've now put up the same text up there. If you read a section of it now without the soundtrack, there's nowhere near the emotion. That's not one of our sound effects, by the way. And I think that's a really key part. We know music brings emotion to everything in our lives. What we are doing is just bringing that to the reading experience. And then finally, we have to be able to make sure that what we're doing has an immersive quality. Booktrack is the only enhancement to reading that's delivered to you while you read. Every other enhancement takes you out of the reading experience. Different things: the future of reading, an advance in publishing, or just a fun way to read. Many said it transformed their reading experience, and the users loved it. Our Twitter feed is constantly alive with all different languages of the world talking about the amazing experiences that they're having, and they're asking for more content now. And there's been some certain markets that have popped up, like the commuter market, who are already used to reading with a soundtrack while they commute. They read a book, they push play on their playlist, then they're just doing it in an unsynchronized manner at the moment. So with Booktrack, they can now bring those different senses together, and it's proving to be very popular with that market. But there were also some that said, 'You know, perhaps the author's words are enough, and we should just leave it.' When sound was first added to film, Time magazine called the effect 'startling and annoying.' And I think today, it's very hard to imagine a film without sound. But in 1928, that was a reality. And when they added sound to film, it was not very popular. And the reason is it was disruptive. It was establishing a new market and value network, and it was polarizing and paradigm-shifting. And it's the same with Booktrack. You've got to make your own mind up for it. You've got to try it for yourself. And before you make your mind up, just remember: next time you go see a film, if you're happy to sit there and turn the sound down or not. One of the questions we often get asked is, 'What about the effect on learning? How could this have an impact on education?' So a New York University study found that when read with a soundtrack, comprehension and retention were significantly higher compared to when read without a soundtrack. So that's an area we're extraordinarily excited about and really looking forward to working with local universities to explore that further. Now, so back to the problem I outlined right at the beginning. And that is, the problem is not that people are not learning to read. It is that they are not continuing to read. We believe that adding a synchronized soundtrack to text, combined with the really, really cool tech that we've got today in tablets and mobile phones, is a solution to that problem. And how we're going to do that is we're going to make the tech available to everybody. All the tools we've created to synchronize soundtracks with any text, that could be a blog, it could be a letter, it could be a book. We really believe that the future of reading has to be important to us. And we believe that through making the tools available far and wide for anyone to create a soundtrack for any text is going to inspire a new generation of readers to dream again and read again. And hear the future of reading. Thank you.