BAD SINGER
What author Tim Falconer lacks in musical prowess he makes up for in his prose,
“After I was diagnosed, I didn’t even tell friends. So, yeah, it’s a bit embarrassing.”
TIM FALCONER AUTHOR
First, the good news: only 2.5 per cent of the population is scientifically tone deaf. So if you suspect you are, you’re probably being too hard on yourself. The bad news: while researching his new book, Bad Singer, Tim Falconer found out that he officially qualifies.
As a great listener of music, it was a diagnosis the journalist and author found crushing.
“My other books, I would talk about what I was writing,” he says, sipping a bottle of water in a coffee shop near the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal, where he’s just dropped off his Bixi. “This book, I didn’t talk about it because I would have to admit to people I was tone deaf. After I was diagnosed, I didn’t even tell friends. So, yeah, it’s a bit embarrassing.”
With Bad Singer’s publication, Falconer is adjusting to being known as the guy who literally wrote the book on bad singing. His investigation into how science is illuminating the way we experience music covers physical and psychological barriers to singing, how music communicates emotion and the back seat that pitch takes in pop music.
But it’s Falconer’s own attempts to outwit his brain’s deficit and master singing (or at least master singing the Beatles’ “Blackbird”) that forms the throughline of the book.
After Université de Montréal cognitive neuropsychologist Isabelle Peretz diagnosed Falconer with congenital amusia, a term she coined to describe what we commonly call tone deafness, he trained for seven months to improve. Then he returned for further testing.
“I spent a day and a half just failing test after test,” he recalls (in one test, he was asked to identify music as either a waltz or a march; in another, he sang “Happy Birthday” with “la la la” in place of lyrics). “At the end of the day and a half, one of the researchers took me aside and said, ‘We have some results. There has been modest improvement.’ So I thought, I guess I’ll keep going. But I think if I weren’t a writer, I would have given up fairly early on.”
Unusually for an amusic, music is one of Falconer’s defining interests. He’s a regular concertgoer and felt pangs of regret after submitting his 50 favourite songs to a researcher and not including anything by Nirvana. If he couldn’t appreciate pitch, he reasoned, what was he responding to?
Falconer believes that timbre, which is defined as the different textures of sound (an example in Bad Singer is the bassoons of the Jaws soundtrack versus the violins of the Psycho soundtrack), is an under-acknowledged element in music. He notes that contemporary musical trends lean heavily on innovations in timbre (think of how Skrillex manipulated Justin Bieber’s voice into a surreal alien mating call to create the hook for “Where Are Ü Now”).
Although music has been an area of serious scientific study for only a few decades, researchers such as Peretz are making great strides. Her research has already established that an amusic’s child has a 40-per-cent chance of sharing the diagnosis, suggesting a hereditary gene lurks in the brains of the tone deaf. “If you find the genes, you find, really, the origins of music,” Peretz says in Bad Singer.
Unfortunately for Falconer, even that wouldn’t unlock his inner Josh Groban. The best cure is training kids when their brains are developing. There’s also hope for adult amusics who practice hard.
“Some amusics have learned to sing, they just can’t tell if they’re singing in tune,” Falconer says. “My coach would say, ‘I hear improvement,’ but I never knew if he was just saying that.”
The climax of the book comes when Falconer hosts a concert at a friend’s home to show off what he’s learned over the course of writing the book.
“It was months leading up to it of working hard,” he says. “And the last few weeks of really working hard. And the three or four days before my house concert, I was down at (vocal coach) Micah’s (Barnes) place every day, including the morning of. And that was just to sing badly.”
Now that the book is finished, has Falconer continued singing? His lips are shut as he shakes his head: no.