Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music - Hardcover

by Tim Falconer (Author)

In the tradition of Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music and Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, Bad Singer follows the delightful journey of Tim Falconer as he tries to overcome tone deafness -- and along the way discovers what we're really hearing when we listen to music.

Tim Falconer, a self-confessed "bad singer," always wanted to make music, but soon after he starts singing lessons, he discovers that he's part of only 2.5 percent of the population afflicted with amusia -- in other words, he is scientifically tone-deaf.

Bad Singer chronicles his quest to understand human evolution and music, the brain science behind tone-deafness, his search for ways to retrain the adult brain, and his investigation into what we really hear when we listen to music. In an effort to learn more about his brain disorder, he goes to a series of labs where the scientists who test him are as fascinated with him as he is with them. He also sets out to understand why we love music and deconstructs what we really hear when we listen to it. And he unlocks the secret that helps explain why music has such emotional power over us.

Author Biography

Tim Falconer is an award-winning journalist and author of three books of nonfiction, including Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile and That Good Night: Ethicists, Euthanasia, and End-of-Life Care. In 2010, he won a Canadian Institutes of Health Research journalism award to write about music and health, allowing him to produce a well-received 5,500-word piece about amusia that appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Maisonneuve. That piece won a National Magazine Award and was followed by a radio documentary on the same subject on CBC Radio's Ideas. He teaches magazine journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto and Creative Nonfiction at the University of King's College in Halifax. He lives in Toronto.