fact checking
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.
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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 […]