HOUSE OF ANANSI, MAY 2016I’ve spent my career bothering people. As a journalist and author, I hang around and watch what folks do, and I ask too many questions, some better than others. Later, I have follow-up queries and clarification requests, and I bug them for those stats they promised to provide me. But something different happened when I started researching congenital amusia, the scientific term for tone deafness present at birth, for my new book, Bad Singer. The scientists were as interested in me as I was in them.
My idea was to learn to sing and then write about the experience as a way to explore the science of singing. After my second voice lesson, I went to the Université de Montréal’s International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research (BRAMS). I fully expected Isabelle Peretz, a pioneer in amusia research, to say I was just untrained. Instead, she diagnosed me as amusic.
“So this means what?” I asked.
“We would love to test you more.”
The BRAMS researchers weren’t alone. While still at Harvard’s Music and Neuroimaging Lab, Psyche Loui—who now leads Wesleyan University’s Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics (MIND) Lab—identified a neural pathway called the arcuate fasciculus as the culprit of congenital amusia. So I emailed her to set up an ...
