My Top Tunes (and Albums) of 2020
My Top Tunes (and Albums) of 2020 Living in a pandemic has obviously been a drag, but I prefer to focus on the year’s good things. One of the advantages of being old is that the idea of staying home at night doesn’t seem so tragic, a development I never thought possible. With no hockey […]
My Favourite Music of 2019
My Favourite Music of 2019 I’m back. A year older, a year less relevant. But people seem to want me to do this so, even if it’s just for a laugh, here is my round-up of the music I liked most in 2019. Once again, I’ve created a Spotify playlist of selected songs for your […]
Some Music I Loved in 2018
While I’m sure my musical diet becomes less and less relevant with each passing year, irrelevancy never stopped me before. So here goes. (And if you want to listen while you read, here’s a Spotify playlist.) I’m going to start with Boygenius, the EP that represents the theme of much of the music I listened […]
The Music I Loved in 2017
The Music I Loved in 2017 The older I get, the harder it is for me to keep up with all the new music that comes out. Both parts of that sentence are hard for me to admit. Fortunately, I’m practiced at denial. So, with that caveat, here’s a look back at my year […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
