What's that sound? (The Lost Post)

I wrote a draft of this post about 3 years ago (in 2009, from the looks of it) and just rediscovered it now (in 2012) while making some long-overdue tweaks to the blog. But hey, I'm all about rediscovering lost music, so why not lost posts, too?

It's tempting to resume posting here after a three-month absence without any explanation whatsoever. Okay, I guess I could toss out a clue or two, but otherwise, let's just move on as if it was only yesterday I was going on about this guy.

A few random items from here and there:
*An interesting longish NPR interview with Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever. I didn't hear the entire thing live, so this is as much a reminder for me as it is a heads-up to you. Not just to listen, but to read the book.

*Depending on when you see this and where you live, you might still be able to catch The Music Instinct: Science and Song, a PBS documentary (premiering tonight around these parts) about "how and why music penetrates the brain and the emotions," according to the capsule summary on our pseudoTiVo. Check out the show's site for video clips on birdsong, various McFerrins, and the duo of Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley, among much other material. (As I suspected, the program appears to focus on the work of Daniel Levitin, who wrote one of two kinda recent pop-scientific books on musical obsession. (Oliver Sacks wrote the other.) Full disclosure: I haven't read either one yet, despite the passage of a couple of years. But I've always planned to, and to write about them here.