Steve Pretty On The origin Of The Pieces podcast

A show for anyone who has ever listened to, played, improvised or written music and wanted to know more about these mysterious sounds. Are they 'auditory cheesecake' as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker claims, or actually a fundamental part of what has made us into modern humans? As fun as it is thoughtful, this show aims to help you hear and appreciate music in a new way.

Hello everyone. 

TLDR: I have a new podcast. Please listen.

Now.

After loving making my lockdown podcast House Music with Steve Pretty, I’ve been wanting to do something more permanent and ongoing for ages. 

And the day has finally come when I can announce that my new podcast Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces is GO - it’s live right now in all the usual places. 

It’s a show about what music is, where it comes from and why it exists, and my very grand ambition is to help listeners to hear and understand music in a new way. 

It’s for anyone who is interested in music, whether as a listener, a player, a music maker or anything in between. 

It’s going to have a lot of music, a bit of evolutionary biology, a bit of musicology, a bit of neuroscience, a bit of general chat, but most of all, a lot of fun and silliness. 

In this first episode, for example, I talk about what the origins of music can teach us about ourselves now, bring Jo to muck about in my studio wearing some binaural mics (headphones on!), muse on the limitations of music theory, attempt to create some heavy metal music and play the conch shell a lot. But it’s more coherent than it sounds, I promise. 

It’s coming out every two weeks (first and third Thursday of the month), and there are going to be all manner of guests, live shows and the like coming up. It’s not really one of those ‘two people chatting for 90 mins’ shows, as I’ll be bringing people in ad hoc, asking them to help with my ludicrous genre challenge (exploring every one of wikipedia’s list of 1300+ music genres), mucking about, recording them playing, having serious musicians do silly things etc etc. 

Yes I know it’s a cliche another middle class white bloke starting a podcast, but I’m really proud of this first episode, and am feeling very excited about what’s to come. 

I’m afraid I’ll be wanging on about it quite a lot over the coming weeks and months, for which I hope you’ll forgive me, but it’s a lot of work and it needs ears on it, so needs must.

So, please ROLL UP, subscribe, listen, rate, sign up to the mailing list on my website etc etc etc.

Thanks everyone!