Isabelle Peretz made me an espresso in her office. This, I would soon realize, was the equivalent of giving a cigarette to a man about to face the firing squad. Peretz is a cognitive neuropsychologist and a professor at Université de Montréal, where she is a founding co-director of the influential International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, better known by the acronym BRAMS. It was March 2011, and I’d travelled to her lab on the north side of Mont Royal, the big hill that sits in the middle of Montreal, to determine once and for all whether I was really, scientifically tone deaf.
I wasn’t particularly nervous as I walked from the Metro station up to the former convent that’s now home to BRAMS on what I, as a McGill grad, always considered the other side of the mountain. True, I hadn’t done all that well on the ...
