If the visual aspect is only a small part of my gaming, music is an even smaller part.
The two GMs that I have played with most recently have played background music during the game session. My old school DM finds fantasy movie or video game music on YouTube, which he plays on his Xbox. Though there are the occasional ads, he keeps the music at a background volume so it isn't too distracting, whether music or ads.
My other GM puts a lot of effort into sound design. Not just music, but sound effects. One adventure he ran involved being on an oil rig in a hurricane, so he had a soundtrack of intense wind and rain playing throughout, with the occasional groaning metal. He's slightly lazier with music, generally starting with a song that fits the mood, but letting YouTube's Mix feature take it from there. Again, the music is fairly low volume, but it can sometimes surprise you how things can change in the time that you're not paying attention.
For my own efforts, I purchased the soundtrack to Transformers: The Movie (The 80's animated movie. You know, the good Transformers movie) to play during my convention scenario "Transformers: Attack of the Retcons." It was a nice touch, but could have gone better in more competent hands. I was playing it on a Discman (Those were the days) and had to make sure that songs were looping instead of just playing through the album. Which just highlighted how much longer it can take to play through scenes in an RPG compared to a movie.
My next attempt at music was actually impromptu. During my OSR megadungeon game, my players discovered a blue metal box bolted to the floor in one place in the dungeon. (No, it wasn't the TARDIS) It was a magical mailbox that would mail anything you put in it to whatever address you wrote on the package. But my players were good sports and tried to approach it as fantasy adventurers would. One of them told the party druid to polymorph into something that would fit through the mail slot and see what was in it.
Inspiration struck and rather than try to describe the cosmic nexus that was obviously inside, I turned to Behold The Crossing Guard, from Tom Smith's opera The Last Hero On Earth. Once you ignore the dialogue, the song does a better job than I could of conveying cosmic mystery.
My next attempt at music was actually impromptu. During my OSR megadungeon game, my players discovered a blue metal box bolted to the floor in one place in the dungeon. (No, it wasn't the TARDIS) It was a magical mailbox that would mail anything you put in it to whatever address you wrote on the package. But my players were good sports and tried to approach it as fantasy adventurers would. One of them told the party druid to polymorph into something that would fit through the mail slot and see what was in it.
Inspiration struck and rather than try to describe the cosmic nexus that was obviously inside, I turned to Behold The Crossing Guard, from Tom Smith's opera The Last Hero On Earth. Once you ignore the dialogue, the song does a better job than I could of conveying cosmic mystery.
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