Bad Singer

  • Dawson City’s 1905 Stanley Cup challenge

    I recently managed to find another excuse to visit the Yukon. I did events to promote Bad Singer in Whitehorse and Dawson City, saw friends and enjoyed the scenery, the skies and the light, but the main reason for my trip was research. I want to write a historical non-fiction book about Dawson City’s 1905 Stanley Cup challenge. In those days, before the NHL, the Stanley Cup signalled amateur supremacy in Canada. And once a team won the Cup, it had to defend the title. So an all-star team from Dawson City issued a challenge to the Ottawa Hockey Club. Often known as…

  • Good Listening in 2016

      Since I devoted most of the year to promoting my new book, Bad Singer, perhaps I could be forgiven for thinking I spent more time talking about music than actually listening to it. But it only felt that way. In fact, when I look back, I listened to a lot of great music this year. I also burned a mix CD for the first time in a while. I regularly made them for my friends Rick and Nini, but while we were on a canoe trip in the Yukon this summer, Rick reminded me that I hadn’t given him one in…

  • Media Round-up #3

    Bad Singer is still popping up in the media so here’s another round-up as 2016 comes to a close. Year-end Lists “A music fan who can’t carry a tune to save his life, Falconer digs into the science of singing, offering himself up as a guinea pig along the way. He might be a terrible singer, but he’s a great writer.” — Citation from The Globe 100, The Globe and Mail‘s prestigious annual list of the year’s best books Bad Singer also made CBC Music’s list of the best music books of 2016 Reviews “Falconer’s naive layperson narrator functions especially well as a…

  • Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Lecture

    Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of my favourite albums. But this sonic masterpiece was also one that said a lot about the state of the recording industry, predicted the future of how we’d listen to music and was the band’s departure that marked the end of the beginning for alt-country. I’ll be giving a lecture on the influence of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on November 17 as part of a series called Sounds of the Times: Albums that Change How We Listen sponsored by Ryerson University’s Philosophy department.                

  • Media Round-up #2

      The coverage of Bad Singer continued in the summer. Here’s a new round-up: Reviews • “It’s a remarkable story of dogged determination to prove his own body wrong and, as such, is one of the more illuminating cultural studies of modern times.” — “Tim Falconer’s Bad Singer is a treatise on understanding our bodies and their true limitations” by Vish Khanna (The Globe and Mail; July 16, 2016) • “Written in an engaging, self-aware and often self-deprecating voice, Bad Singer is an odyessy musicians and amusics alike can appreciate.” — “Bad Singer” by Kate Sheridan (McGill News; Spring-Summer 2016) •…

  • Media Round-up #1

    I’ve been fortunate to receive a lot of attention for Bad Singer. And the above illustration, from this Quill & Quire profile, makes me look far better and younger than I deserve. Here’s a round-up of the coverage so far: Reviews • “Over the last decade there have been a number of books published about the science of music—such as Daniel Levitan’s This Is Your Brain on Music, Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia, and David Byrne’s How Music Works—and Bad Singer is a doubly successful effort because it doesn’t retread the same ground of these books, with Falconer couching his subject in…

  • A Bad Singer Playlist

    A Bad Singer Playlist “Writing about music,” Martin Mull quipped, “is like dancing about architecture.” Part of the problem, of course, is that the reader wants to hear what the writer is going on about. And, inevitably, I refer to many, many songs in Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music. So here’s your chance to hear nine of them.

  • I’m an Author for Indies

    I’m an Author for Indies Books and music are the only two things I truly enjoy shopping for so the revival of independent booksellers and vinyl record shops has made me happier (though, admittedly, poorer). That’s why I am thrilled to be taking part in this year’s Authors for Indies, a great annual event in support of Canada’s beloved independent book stores. The idea is that book lovers come in and meet writers and find out what they’re reading. On Saturday, April 30, I’ll be recommending good reads at Book City’s Yonge and St. Clair store from 12:30 to 1:30.…

  • The terroir of sound

    The terroir of sound Timbre — the terroir of sound — is crucial to how we hear music. But we don’t talk about it much because, unlike pitch, it has so far proven to be immune to measurement. The fine folks at Hazlitt, the excellent digital publication, have posted a Bad Singer excerpt that explains timbre’s role in music.

  • Why I won’t sing at my book launch

    Why I won’t sing at my book launch Yes, my new book is called Bad Singer. No, I won’t sing at the launch party. That’s because I am part of just 2.5 percent of the population that suffers from amusia, the technical term for tone deafness. Amusia is a brain disorder similar to dyslexia. And if I’d written a book about being dyslexic, no one would respond to my invitation by saying, “I’ll come only if you read for us.” Apparently, singing is different. Maybe people want a laugh. Maybe they get off on the humiliation of others. Maybe other…