My Favourite Music of 2023
My Favourite Music of 2023 Sorry, my favourite-music-of-the-year post is shorter than usual because my book* is due in a month (and I’ve left the hardest parts to the end). But I did create a playlist, which you can listen to on Apple Music or Spotify, and that’s more useful because as the old saying goes, writing about […]
My Favourite Music of 2022
My Favourite Music of 2022 Apparently, I need a deadline. On the other hand, waiting until the last minute gives me more listening time. Although I don’t pretend this is the best music of 2022, it is my favourite music of the year (as of right now). For whatever that’s worth. But if you find […]
My Favourite Music of 2021
My Favourite Music of 2021 Some years, I have a hard time picking a favourite album. Not this year. Cassandra Jenkins’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature came out in February and has been in heavy rotation ever since. She creates such a mood with these intimate and atmospheric songs and my love for this album hasn’t waned […]
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 […]
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.
The music I loved in 2015
The music I loved in 2015 I spent 2015 finishing up a book called Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music. So while I thought a lot about how we listen to music, I didn’t have as much free time to actually listen to it as I usually do. Sure, I […]
