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

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Bad Singer

The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music

Tim Falconer

Copyright © 2016 Tim Falconer

Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Falconer, Tim, 1958–, author 

Bad singer : the surprising science of tone deafness and how we hear 

music / Tim Falconer. 

Includes bibliographical references and index. 

Issued in print and electronic formats. 

ISBN 978-1-77089-445-7 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-77089-446-4 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-77089-490-7 (mobi) 

1. Music—Acoustics and physics.  2. Musical perception.  3. Hearing.  

4. Amusia.  I. Title. 

ML3820.F34 2016 781.1’1 C2015-907615-3 

C2015-907616-1

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

Cover image: Kourosh Keshiri

Cover image art direction: Anna Minzhulina

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace ownership of copyright material. The publisher will gladly rectify any inadvertent errors or omissions in credits in future editions.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Carmen

CONTENTS

Side One: Music and Human Evolution

Track 1: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

Track 2: It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)

Track 3: For the Sake of the Song

Track 4: The Harder They Come

Side Two: The Science of Tone Deafness

Track 5: I’ve Got News for You

Track 6: Tell It Like It Is

Track 7: Can You Hear the Music

Track 8: Blue Highways

Side Three: How We Hear Music

Track 9: Cum on Feel the Noize

Track 10: Wordy Rappinghood

Track 11: Small Change

Track 12: Come Undone

Side Four: Unlocking a Surprising Secret of Music

Track 13: Teacher Teacher

Track 14: If I Only Had a Brain

Track 15: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Track 16: Higher Ground

Bonus Track: Silver and Gold

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

We don’t make music—it makes us.

— David Byrne, How Music Works

SIDE ONE

Music and Human Evolution

Track One

"Sweet Dreams

(Are Made of This)"

So could you ask him to move or to stop singing?

She was talking about me. Instead of sitting at our desks, we were standing along the side wall facing the middle of the classroom. We were in rows rather than in a clump as the teacher had arranged us, perhaps by height, perhaps by voice, perhaps by some other measure. The other details are even hazier. I don’t remember the song or even why we were singing it. Maybe our teacher was trying to create a class choir for a school event. I was keen until the girl standing next to me complained that I was singing off-key and that it was throwing her off. So, Mrs. Lennox, would you please do something about that?

The memory ends abruptly there, as if I’d woken up from a bad dream before it was over, so I don’t know what happened next. I think I’d remember if I felt particularly traumatized or went home in tears, though if I can still hear those words all these decades later, I guess it must have made some impression. But the experience was probably more confusing than anything else since I didn’t understand what it meant to sing off-key. And I certainly didn’t know how to go about singing on-key. Mostly, though, I was surprised. I was eight or nine and had no idea I was a bad singer. I don’t remember singing in class again. Maybe Mrs. Lennox found something else for me to do. Or maybe I just went outside and played with my friends, which would have appealed to me more, anyway.

This is the part of the story where many people telling a similar tale would say, And I never sang again. For a time, I thought that was true for me as well. But the more I mined my memory, the more I realized I was surprisingly slow to give up singing. I was a loudmouth kid, and I don’t think I became all that self-conscious about my singing until I was about fifteen and on a ski trip to Vermont with some friends. Sitting around in the hotel, I absent-mindedly started singing Blackbird by The Beatles. One of my friends—and I’m sure it’s significant that she was a she—laughed and said, Oh, Tim hit a note. And then everyone laughed. That’s when I finally realized how bad I truly was.

After that, I never felt comfortable singing in public again. By which I mean singing in front of women or people I didn’t know. The all-boys school I attended had mandatory morning prayers, which involved singing dusty old hymns. My buddies and I would scream out the lyrics at the top of our lungs. But that bad singing was an admirable act of rebellion as much as an expression of how much I enjoyed doing it. Today, I happily sing only when no one is around. Alone in the car, I’ll belt out tune after tune. When I’m within earshot of other people, though, I am a silent crooner: an interior virtuoso, with or without iPod accompaniment, while walking down the street or riding my bike.

But I want to sing out loud—not like an angel, necessarily, but well enough that I’m not ashamed. When I’m at a friend’s cottage and everyone brings out guitars around the campfire, I don’t want to be the one who mumbles along quietly. And when the guys I play hockey with on Friday afternoons have a jam party with guitars and banjos, keyboards, drums, flutes, and harmonicas, I long to step up to the mic and croon away. I want to be the lead singer.

I’m a bad singer. And deep down, it matters. I’ve lived with the indignity and the frustration and the missed joy and assumed there was nothing I could do about it. But singing is something we should all be able to do, even if we do it badly. It is the most common form of music across all cultures, and traditionally, whenever people gathered they would sing. The voice is that rare instrument that we always have with us, so it’s easy to create music whenever and wherever we want. And compared with our bare hands and feet—which make for serviceable percussion instruments—the voice is so much more versatile. We can sing a stirring aria, an angry punk song, or a tender lullaby.

Still, so many of us prefer to be silent. Our lack of confidence is understandable since we are at our most vulnerable when we sing. A poor guitarist still has the instrument as a shield; a singer has nothing to hide behind.

And yet, singing is what I most want to do.

In 2007, I spent a month at the Banff Centre, along with other artists, writers, and musicians working on their latest projects. My studio in the woods featured a black Blüthner baby grand piano, which I had to water. Seriously. That part of Alberta has an arid climate—it was an especially hot, dry summer, too—and pianos require a certain level of humidity to prevent the wood from warping. A couple of times a week, I filled a small plastic watering can in the kitchenette that mostly served as my wet bar. Then I stuck the can’s long spout into the baby grand’s internal humidifier and poured. I did this chore cheerfully, but otherwise, I never touched that beautiful instrument.

One day, as I was writing at my desk beside the piano, listening to music, as I always do when I work, I wondered how someone with such a large library of songs—ten thousand and growing rapidly—could be, as I had long suspected, tone deaf. I found that baffling. When I hosted a musicale at the studio, which was my way of ensuring the baby grand’s keys didn’t go untickled the whole time, several opera singers showed up. How could I be tone deaf and still love music? I asked. They scoffed at my self-diagnosis and one even offered to prove me wrong.

The next day, mezzo-soprano Catharin Carew showed me some breathing exercises, then asked me to match her notes. Her verdict: I wasn’t singing the right ones, but I had a good, resonant voice. She didn’t think I was tone deaf. I could differentiate notes, and when I sang the wrong one I was off by what she considered a perfect amount. Instead of being ninety-seven cents off, she said, you’re exactly a dollar off.

I had no sense of why that was a good thing, but Carew seemed pleased, so I eagerly repeated her explanation to anyone who would listen, the way kids share jokes they don’t really understand. Best of all, Carew told me that, with training, I had the potential to play the lead in a community theatre musical. (Later, in the dining hall, though, when I sat with the opera singers, she told them that I could be in community theatre.) I didn’t care about a theatre career, and I had long ago come to accept that I’d never be a rock star. But I did want to be able to sing in front of other people without being a horrific, or hilarious, spectacle.

For a couple of years, the idea of learning to sing remained just one of the many things I dreamed of but never did anything about. Then a friend suggested I talk to Micah Barnes. The tall, well-built singing coach had a mop of dark hair and a small soul patch when I first met him. He owns a lot of vinyl; among the albums he had off the shelf and on display that day was The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland. I really just wanted to hang out and listen to that record, but I forced myself to explain why I was there. I told him that I might be tone deaf, but I still wanted to learn to sing.

Barnes sat down on his piano bench and hummed a note, then asked me to try to match it. He didn’t wince. We did it again. He pointed out that I was finding the right note, though not right away, so we’d need to work on speeding up that mental process. He told me I could sing harmony, though I didn’t have the melody yet. When he asked me if I realized I was singing in harmony—this is what Carew’s dollar metaphor was all about—I admitted I never have any idea what notes I’m singing. Singing for me, I explained, is like the time I went skeet shooting with my grandfather when I was a little kid. He gave me a shotgun and barked, Pull. After a couple of my hopeless efforts, he took the gun away and said, You’re just shooting blindly.

I sing blindly, too.

Barnes understood my story. But he still asked me to sing a song.

Oh, I can’t sing, I insisted.

Okay, he said. That’s a good place to start.

Once again, he asked me to sing a song. But my mind went completely blank. All the lyrics that usually come so easily disappeared. I’d told him that my dream was to be able to sing a Nick Lowe song on stage, but suddenly I couldn’t remember more than the first line of Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day. So he sang Amazing Grace and I repeated his lines, even trying to ape the little flourish he put on wretch.

He didn’t think I had any tone impairment, and suggested I come in once a week, maybe even twice, and then after a month, we could develop a plan to get me singing in public in a year, maybe less. I’d definitely need to work hard, he said, but he thought I could learn to sing. That was something I had never thought possible. And at times over the next several years, it didn’t seem possible.

As it turned out, though, trying to learn how to sing proved to be a far more valuable experience than I ever could have imagined.

Track Two

"It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll

(But I Like It)"

I felt ridiculous. I was only a few minutes into my first session with Micah Barnes, and I was already giggling nervously. He’d made me lie down on my back on his couch and make weird noises. After asking me to sing Amazing Grace a couple of times, he was hassling me about my breathing, trying to get me to do it with my diaphragm instead of my chest.

Fill your diaphragm with air to make a balloon, he said, and press your fingers against the balloon. But when I took in a breath my shoulders rose, which meant that I wasn’t doing it right.

So he asked me to lie down and sigh repeatedly. Put your hand on your diaphragm and as you breathe in, work against gravity and then let go. Feel how that’s like a balloon that fills up and lets go? That’s the secret.

But that’s not helping my ear, I said.

"You don’t know that yet. Blow up a balloon and then let it go so it goes aaah. Oh, and do it with your tongue out."

Barnes, who was born in 1960, rents an apartment above a men’s clothing store on a lively Toronto strip of bars, restaurants, and galleries called West Queen West. I’d expect a much younger man to live here. Streetcars rumble by regularly; occasionally fire trucks from the nearby station wail their sirens. When I started my lessons in 2011, he had a large black sectional couch from Ikea, a curved white chair from Structube, and a black bookcase full of CDs, LPs, photos, and keepsakes. He’s not shy about showing off his favourites: he often displays albums and, for a long time, a copy of a songwriting magazine with Elvis Costello on the cover rested on a music stand. An upright piano, borrowed from a friend, sat by a window, overlooking the street. The place had no air conditioning, so in the summer he set up a fan and left the windows open, which made me especially self-conscious about appalling (or amusing) everyone on the sidewalk below. I’d been here once before, a year and a half earlier, when I’d first contacted him about my nutty idea to try to learn how to sing. Now, at long last, I was back, chequebook in hand and ready to do it.

Unlike me, Barnes comes from a musical tradition. His father, Milton Barnes, was a classical composer, and his younger brothers also went into the family business. Daniel is a drummer and bandleader, and Ariel is a cellist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. In the 1980s, Micah played gigs as part of the Micah Barnes Trio, a cabaret act that included his brother Daniel, while also working in film, TV, and theatre. Realizing that the actors who were supposed to deliver his lyrics weren’t good enough singers, he started inviting them to his place so he could offer a little informal training—and soon discovered that he had a knack for helping people free their minds and bodies so they could become better singers. And like many artists, he also figured out that teaching is a good way to supplement an income that can be meagre or sporadic or both.

In 1989, he joined The Nylons. A Canadian institution, this popular a cappella group has survived many lineup changes since 1979. Hired to sing baritone, Barnes soon understood that the job also meant singing tenor, including falsetto, and bass, depending on which of the four Nylons was singing lead. He was too busy to do much teaching, but he learned how crucial good technique is. Barnes lasted with the group until 1994, when the touring became too much of a drag. He moved to LA, where he kept playing and teaching. In 2003, he and house music producers Thunderpuss released a single called Welcome to My Head that hit number one on Billboard’s club chart.

He’s operated his one-teacher school, called Singers Playground, since 1996. Most of his clients are professional singers and actors (I was probably more impressed than I should have been when I learned that he’d worked with Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany) or people who want to be pros. For most amateurs—the folks who say, I’ve always wanted to sing and I’m finally going to take lessons—he’s too expensive, charging $125 per session (or $400 for four).

After doing the breathing exercises for a while, I asked, What do your neighbours think?

They know what I do for a living, he responded matter-of-factly. And he makes even good singers do this exercise, because it gets them relaxed. If you’re relaxed, he assured me, you’ll hit the notes better. Maybe not perfectly, but better. That’s how babies breathe—they use their stomach, not their chest. But as we get older, we unlearn the correct way and learn the wrong way: tension-filled breathing.

I kept doing as he asked, but I couldn’t get over the giggles. Part of it was nervous tittering, but the whole situation was so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. He wondered what was up. I looked at you and started laughing, I said. I won’t do that again.

While Barnes grew up in a musical home, I didn’t. My mother didn’t even sing to me when I was a baby. But she did play DJ for my sisters and me when we were little, even spinning records for us on an all-request basis. As a small boy, my favourite song was Peter, Paul and Mary’s Puff (the Magic Dragon), which I insisted she play over and over again so I could sing along.

My father’s vinyl collection was limited: bagpipe records; Christmas carols, which he played even in the summer; and Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. (I don’t remember him ever playing that record. He may have owned it only for the seriously great cover featuring a beautiful woman slathered in whipped cream.)

My parents did make an effort. They signed my sisters up for the obligatory middle-class piano lessons. I started drumming classes but then had mysterious health problems—diagnosed several years later as childhood migraines—and never returned. My second-youngest sister took guitar lessons, but when the teacher tried to show her how to tune it, he was astonished that she couldn’t hear the difference between pitches. She couldn’t distinguish the frequency of notes (how high or low they are). Later, when my youngest sister took up guitar as an adult for a few years, she too was frustrated by her inability to hear pitch well enough to tune the instrument and eventually gave up trying. There wasn’t a musician in the bunch.

So we did not make music together as a family. My mom figured we were all tone deaf, so what would be the point? And I don’t remember my friends or cousins making a lot of music with their families. I’m sure some did, if only singalongs on road trips, when I wasn’t around. But it was the 1960s and my generation—Generation Jones—grew up around the television, the electronic babysitter, not around the piano.

Still, I loved music. At twelve, I went to my first concert, an all-day, all-Canadian affair at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium headlined by The Guess Who. By sixteen, I wanted to be Marvin Gaye. In the late ’70s, I pogoed at punk shows. I was not the coolest kid—I was the only person in a button-down Oxford shirt and chinos in the mosh pit at a Viletones gig at Montreal’s Hotel Nelson, and I’m still not sure if that punked-out woman who seemed so fascinated by my presence was hitting on me or goofing on me—but I loved giving myself over to what I was hearing. Still do.

Music means the most to us when we are in our teens and early twenties. That’s when we have the time and the angsty need to connect with our emotions and with other people experiencing them. One U.S. study found that fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds spend just over three hours a day listening to tunes, with girls devoting more time to the activity than boys, and black and Hispanic kids more dedicated than white ones. For many people, music loses some of its power as they grow up. They don’t have the time to seek out new artists—when I first began to notice this tendency among my friends, I joked about people whose last new album was Michael Jackson’s Thriller—and seem content to buy overpriced tickets to see tired reunion shows in hockey arenas and football stadiums.

Regardless of our age, the way we listen to music has changed. As a teenager, I’d take some money I’d saved or earned and go downtown to the flagship Sam the Record Man store on Yonge Street or, later, while going to school in Montreal, I’d head over to Phantasmagoria on Park Avenue. I’d browse for a long time, flipping through the albums, buy one (ideally, more than one, if I was flush), and then go home to play it. I wouldn’t just play it, I’d listen to it with focus and enthusiasm. I didn’t try to multi-task other than studying the liner notes; the music fully captured my attention. Even if I’d invited a friend over when I’d just bought a new record, we would really listen, though maybe we’d also smoke a joint.

I devoted so many hours to the ritual of just listening. I don’t do that as much anymore. A few years ago, feeling ashamed that I knew next to nothing about classical music, I took a couple of night courses to learn about it. The textbook talked about the need for active listening. I understood why, and I heard so much more when I listened actively, but I really did it only because I was studying for the exams. Then I went back to my old habits—passive listening. I’m now too hyper and distracted to just sit and do one thing. And the technology makes that ritual of really listening seem anachronistic: the idea of inviting someone over to hear songs you just downloaded is laughable. Even downloading is starting to feel old-fashioned as people turn to YouTube and streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify.

But passive listening risks turning music into aural wallpaper. Along with producing several great albums (including some by the Talking Heads), Brian Eno has devoted much of his innovative career to developing ambient music. Contemplating Eno’s influence on music over more than four decades, Sasha Frere-Jones writes in The New Yorker that the Ambient 1: Music for Airports album is too beautiful to ignore and so it’s a failure as ambient music. But, in some ways, history and technology have accomplished what Eno did not, he goes on. With the disappearance of the central home stereo, and the rise of earbuds, MP3s, and the mobile, around-the-clock work cycle, music is now used, more often than not, as background music.

If you ever find yourself in a room full of music psychologists and start to get bored, you can always liven things up by blurting out auditory cheesecake. This is the advice Peter Pfordresher, a University of Buffalo psychologist, gave me. That’s because there’s no agreement on