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THE RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTS OF THE LATE The Mothers Voice Intra Uterine Listening The Voice We Yearn To Hear The Mothers Voice: One fine day, Dr. Tomatis fell upon the realization that by taking a person from listening through a medium of liquid, (as is the case for a fetus before birth, as it is surrounded by amniotic fluid) into the environment of listening through the medium of air which is the way we listen in our natural environment starting approximately 2 weeks after birth, one was in fact subjecting the person to a Sonic birth. The person could thus regress back into the womb and deal with any trauma encountered during the various stages of development to be reborn without that baggage. Dr. Tomatis recorded major psychological changes in the clients subjected to this. This initial experimentation opened the door to new research. He wondered, if the reactions obtained here could be controlled and duplicated through harnessing the power of the crude method he used to do this by finding a way of making that method uniform, because that would mean of course that it could be used to help a lot of people with various ailments. One should note that Dr. Alfred Tomatis, was concerned primarily with finding cures and ways to help his ailing patients. He was an avid researcher, ready to look in the most remote places for answers, but he never forgot that he was in fact a Doctor an ENT. When he made the formally mentioned observation, he immediately foresaw the possibilities this could offer the fields of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. But not being a specialist in these fields, he was careful not to make any assumptions or claims, and chose instead to share his findings with other who were experts in those fields. These observations, of course, peaked the interest of psychoanalysts, curious about the mother-child relationship, the genesis of affectivity, and psychological life before birth. Intrigued by all of this, a representative of the field of psychoanalysis came to visit Dr. Tomatis one day accompanied by one of his clients. The client was a 14 year old child who seemed confused. He seemed to repel his mother much like two magnets of the same polarity would. He muttered continuously. Dr. Tomatis was informed by the psychoanalyst that the child he had brought with him was schizophrenic. Dr. Tomatis asked him to explain the term and was told that this was the diagnosis given to people who didn’t seem to know who they were. Dr. Tomatis understood at that moment why he had been brought to see him. Fifteen days later, having recorded the voice of the 14 year old schizophrenic’s mother and having developed his system, Dr. Tomatis brought everyone involved together in his laboratory. He put himself close to the door and positioned the mother on his left along with the psychoanalyst. The child, was quite distressed at the lack of space and ran around scribbling everywhere with a piece of chalk he had found. Dr. Tomatis put on the sound. He did not want to carry out a sonic birth yet, but rather wanted to familiarize the child with filtered sound, similar to the frequencies of sound that the boy would have been exposed to as a fetus. Quite fascinatingly, the child abruptly stopped scribbling; he sped to the light switch and turned it off. All was dark except for the controlling lights of the equipment Dr. Tomatis was using to manipulate the sound. The child then sped over towards his mother, and sat on her knees, he put her arms around himself and promptly started sucking his thumb. Dr. Tomatis likened this to being returned to the womb. This was all the more striking as Dr. Tomatis had been told that for the last 10 years although living with his mother; the boy seemed not to know her at all. When the tape ended, the child rose, put on the light and the session ended there. They scheduled to meet again in 8 days in order to accomplish the sonic birth. On their return, the mother announced that the relationship between herself and her son had improved considerably. The child had approached her, and certain things that she was unaccustomed to had taken place. The second session began in much the same way as the first: the child extinguished the light and sat in his mothers lap in a fetal position. As soon as the sonic birth began the child started to chatter, and his chatter surely had a meaning to it but no one there was able to grasp just what. At the end of the session, the child relit the room, turned towards his mother and buttoned all of her buttons. This was a symbolic gesture of control; he seemed to be closing a part of his life that he was going to leave for ever. This did not evade his psychoanalyst who told Dr. Tomatis, you see he was finally born, but I would have never thought it could be made to happen this quickly. In fact, that had probably been a little too quick. Dr. Tomatis recognized that fact and readily admitted it. It had been a mistake, done so abruptly, the sonic birth could expose a subject to serious dangers: the child in question tried to destroy himself because he had scratched himself! This mistake was however, laden with lessons. The child’s psychoanalyst however, preferred to leave it at that. Dr. Tomatis, on the other hand, obsessed over finding a method that would bestow all the benefits of his initial experiments but without any of the disadvantages. So, in order to better understand what occurred, he went more and more slowly, until he finally achieved what he sought out to achieve with the help of other psychoanalysts using every precaution to avoid what happened to the above mentioned child. By perfectly controlling the various stages of the process, Dr. Tomatis succeeded in making the program harmless, ready to relieve clients symptoms without the alarming side effects. So it was that Dr. Tomatis’ curiosity to find out what could happen, gave way to practical uses for the experiments he undertook that were initially aimed at appeasing his curiosity. These experiments also yielded theoretical findings of great significance. It is through analyzing the reactions caused while subjecting a person to listening through a medium of liquid and then moving on to a sonic birth, that Dr. Alfred Tomatis fully understood what the need to communicate truly entailed and encompassed and how it relates to the origin of language. According to Dr. Tomatis, it is a question of the individual preserving or finding, if lost, the relationship he enjoyed with the maternal surroundings before birth. We are all nostalgic of the uterus. Our entry into the world is accompanied by a cry of distress which according to Dr. Tomatis is testimony to our unhappiness with being forced to leave the paradise that will be lost forever, which is the belly of the mother. Undoubtedly, the contact of the embryo with the latter is more physical than psychological, and language, it also (seeking to reestablish this contact symbolically) has a physical dimension. Words, which cause vibrations in the surrounding air, are a medium through which we seek contact with our interlocutor. For Dr. Tomatis, the instrument that we use to communicate is not in truth, our tongue, our mouth and our larynx but in fact the air which surrounds one. Speaking is preventing a break or disconnection between us and the external world, and between us and others. It is the solution to maintaining a bond with that which is not really us: to hold on to, to a certain extent, the umbilical cord. This, because the first dialogue, reiterates Dr. Alfred Tomatis, is a dialogue of home. At the base of the desire to communicate, one feels an uncontrollable desire to be in contact with the other - this first other being: the mother. The fetus is aware of a bonding between him and his environment, that is in the beginning limited to the uterine walls, but which, after birth, will not cease widening ever larger. To be born, said Dr. Tomatis, is to come to grips with the fact that the uterus bursts into colossal dimensions which is the universe. Initially the uterine walls will grow to encompass the cradle, then the room, then the family, the city, the country, and ultimately the cosmos! Certain beings, those with schizophrenia for example were never born. What that means precisely, is that these individuals are void of the desire to communicate with the environment. It is as if they don’t feel the nostalgia spoken of earlier that seems to characterize those that are truly correctly born. According to Dr. Tomatis in order for this to happen, the relation between fetus and uterus had to have been quite disappointing. Imagine a mother who does not profoundly wish to have her child. It would be erroneous to believe that the child, in one way or another, would not be sensitive to this, and that already before its birth. On the contrary, the child will make note of this fact and at the nimbus of its conscience will not be a bonding but rather a severance with the external world. Such a child, once born, will not have a paradise lost to regain. The communication with others will thus poor, or may even be nonexistent. This, of course, is because of the fact that any anomaly in the structure of the relationship between mother and child is reflected out onto the relationship between the child and its environment and will therefore ultimately impact language. The absence of the desire to speak is common to people with schizophrenia. There is a specific sonic path that a fetus has to follow in order to reach maturity. Unfortunately, the ideal, in this case as in many other cases, is not formulated or set in stone, and therefore there is always the possibility that an accident of any sort will cause a deviation from the ideal trajectory. The accident could be benign enough and correct itself to some extent. But, there are also those that will present with sufficient gravity so as to disturb the development of language profoundly. Due to the fact that language in itself also evolves and moves according to a well defined trajectory it is possible for a person to entirely remake it while being subjected to a sonic birth. Thus, he noted that the first words will be specifically addressing the mother, in a dialogue that strives to echo the one that was not quite started, flesh to flesh, before birth. Initially quite, the child quickly becomes a chatter box. Dr. Alfred Tomatis continues to say that it is the same areu…. Areu… that the child starts saying to address his mother alone will be the start of the child engaging, and then forming complex words like mama… dada…. wewe.. dodo..., etc. This glossary of sound is undoubtedly, at the outset, only a simple set of sounds in which adults endeavor to attribute significance. Actual language will come much later and the father will have to wait a long time before really being indicated by the term ‘dad’ of which he will be so proud. The desire to communicate with the father, is indeed, the start of a new stage of language structuring, the social stage. This, affirmed by contemporary psychoanalysis, is a readiness to embrace the outside world. So our first words are in fact mom and dad. Still, these sounds should not be given significance as at their origin these two terms do not in fact designate the mom and the dad. They appear, quite to the contrary in a very mechanical way. The original cry that is shared with our first breath is superimposed and bestowed with significance. The sound is born as soon as the mouth opens and modulates on the physiological plain. Indeed, at the time that the mouth opens, the tongue and the palate move away simultaneously only to approach one other again when the mouth is closed. The sound thus created seems interrupted, but not entirely distinct and the first ma…ma…ma…ma flies off into space. Many parents will be disappointed by this explanation, but Dr. Alfred Tomatis wants them to know the truth. This mechanical way of foreseeing the genesis of language will break the hearts of many parents as these utterances lose their charm by losing the significance that parents seek to surround them with. However, this does not diminish the transcendent beauty of the structure of human language. The realization that just saying ma-ma-ma immediately brings joy and smiles to the face of the person that this first verbal chain is aimed at, sets an understanding that this sound can be used as a bell to call out to someone, this already comprises teaching the child what the function of speech is and how it can be used. So there is informative value and an awakening of vocal gesture, and due to these utterances, man reaches out to and understands that through breath he give birth to language. Language originates, therefore, in the very breath of the life. That breath, is transformed and is no longer a gesture of the suction of ones lips which is the most animal like gesture of all our automatic movements. From this point on, everything will follow correctly. It is only the first word that counts, the rest is nothing more than an acoustic game of building blocks, where the tightening and relaxing of the lips with every breath form sounds and pa-pa-pa-pa soon follows ma-ma-ma-ma. Just two words and already the verbal world has been built. These words, or to be more exact these verbal chains of ma-ma-ma-ma and pa-pa-pa-pa have taken on a meaning and that meaning is virtually universally the same. The mother, is designated, in many different parts of the world in much the same way with ma-ma, the sound associated with the gesture of suction, that will quickly come to be indicative of the mother, naturally leaving the other sound to designate the other being in the infants life or the father. From that point forward, training is difficult, lasting for weeks. It is necessary to speak, and speak continuously even to oneself. Practice is key. Thus, just as soon as this calling comes to us, we will start chattering incessantly, and nothing will deter us from this obsession. Indeed, the smallest embarrassment that can interfere with this essential phase can often catastrophically compromises the elaboration of this, the most human of our gestures. An illness, that bothers and worries us to the extent of us not wanting to play with our verbal skills any more. A sorrow, or a concern, and we are already vulnerable. It will already have stunted our growth. The little cries, the verbal signs, those that we already know how to use, albeit awkwardly, but none the less use, remain unanswered. If the mother is absent, each vocal gesture will lose its significance, and the building blocks will quickly lose their attraction. This will even perhaps evoke painful memories, that of a presence which is not seen anymore, that of a voice which does not make itself heard anymore. Precautions must be taken to make sure that the infant gets all the necessary stimulation to ensure that he/she acquires all the essentials necessary to progress in language and communication. Still, with each stage of development dangers threaten. In the case of a person suffering from dyslexia, for example, regardless of intelligence, the person faces great difficulties at school in reading, which is typically a subject that benefits greatly from normal language acquisition. For Dr. Tomatis, this disorder occurs, not when communication with the mother proves to be difficult but rather when the meeting with the father (and thus with social language) is difficult. Dr. Tomatis also consulted with children whose language had stopped growing at a certain point of development. In these cases language is poor and does not follow linguistic structure. This is often what occurs in the case of stammers who did not have, particularly on an unconscious level, a normal relationship with their father. Dr. Tomatis believed that in these cases language remained fixed at the stage of language that was created for communicating with the mother, stammering out a song for her. This is how stammering starts, a chronic manifestation of this early stage of communication. Fortunately, the method worked out by Dr. A. A. Tomatis makes it possible to repair this damage that is often extremely significant, even though its cause was trivial. The practical experiments led to theoretical extrapolations, and those, in turn, would generate further practical applications. This is how, with the help of the Electronic Ear, an original therapy, that yielded impressing results was born. Intra Uterine Listening: One of the Pharaohs for example, had decided he wanted to discover how this marvelous instrument of communication, language, had come to man. He had been preceded by legions of philosophers all endeavoring to discover the same. But, he believed that he had found the answer to this mystery. The trick, was to take a child at birth and isolate it. Denying it any contact with language and then wait patiently until the child started speaking. Obviously, the first words of any significance to leave the child’s mouth would be, no doubt, the initial link of any word: the origin of language! The royal experimenter was not disappointed. That first word, was pronounced one fine day, and it was, so it is said, that which meant “bread”. Obviously, this is not possible and is but a myth, one no doubt of many myths generated by humanity in its slow advance towards Knowledge. So then, what is the answer to this enigma? It is not so long ago that the study of language was reserved for a few specialists: linguists, whose work for the most part was met only by polite indifference. Recently, that changed quite suddenly. And today, language is at the center of the work of psychologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, engineers and even of advertisers who often ask linguists for the linguistic formula that will help them sell more of their shaving cream or packet of dry soup. Being an ENT, Dr. Alfred Tomatis was impassioned by these problems. And therefore to a certain extent, he gave new life to the old question, that asks about the origin of language, that had been abandoned for the lack of a satisfactory answer. Dr. Tomatis however, asks this question on a more modest level. It is not any more a question of determining the conditions or circumstances under which human beings first attained speech, but rather of wondering about 2 related things: Firstly, How does man produce articulated sound? And secondly, why does man feel the need to produce these sounds? The first of these questions will surprise the even the naive by its naivety. Doesn't Dr. Tomatis know, as each of us does, that we can speak because our bodies are equipped with equipment expressly intended to fulfill this function? Apparently not, or more to the point, he does not want to know this as he believes it to be untrue! It is not in physiology that we should seek the answer. In Dr. Tomatis’ view nothing is less physiological than speaking! And he continues to explain that this is undoubtedly a phenomenon specific to humans. Still, this does not necessarily mean that there exists a physiologically preconceived organ specific to this task. Admittedly, nothing in our arsenal of accessories, is really intended for this use. We were equipped with a digestive system as well as a respiratory system, but we were not equipped with a system whose specific function was speech. What an incredible task, finding the combination necessary to achieve this goal. The first part is made up from part of the digestive system: the lips, the mouth, the palate, the tongue and the teeth. The second part is made up of part of the respiratory system: the larynx, the nasal fossils, the lungs, the diaphragm, the rib cage, all gathered together harmoniously to form acoustics. In fact in order to put itself at the service of language, the larynx diverted from its primary function and was freed at the same time as the ear, who elaborated its primary function of locating sound to encompass analyzing it. This coincidence is not really astonishing, as the ear and larynx live in true “organic intimacy” as will be seen in any handbook on anatomy. Consequently, reciprocally, hearing and phonation were conditioned: Man speaks insofar as he hears and he understands through predilection of spoken sounds. From this came the paradoxical sayings used by Dr. Tomatis: “One speaks with one’s ear'' or “It is sound that builds the ear". Thus was solved the problem of how. The question of why remained. It is indeed not enough to show that human beings can speak. From a purely physiological point of view, monkeys could also speak. The fact is, however that they do not! The efforts made in this direction in the United States did not come to fruition. They tried hard to make a chimpanzee say five simple words, all connected to his elementary needs, to no avail. What counts then, is not the capacity, but rather the desire. With the origin of the language then, one should find a desire. For Dr. Tomatis, there was no question: it had to be the desire to communicate with others. Ignoring all the fables pertaining to the genesis of language, Dr. Tomatis deliberately stopped at the hypothesis that: “It is perhaps enough for us, to think that the lineage of hominids was, thanks to an exceptional economic situation, equipped with sufficient intelligence to exploit language with the aim of living life jointly in a family or social setting, in the desire to communicate, the need to enrich others with one’s own impressions and to be enriched by the accumulated information collected by others”. What best characterizes language, is indeed, that it distinguishes man from all the other animals, while bringing man closer together. Dr. Alfred Tomatis is not a dogmatic. He could not therefore be satisfied with this affirmation. He patiently, dug away at this first idea that was sufficiently reliable to be used as the basis for further more precise research. Initially he wondered about where the desire to communicate, the need to maintain permanent contact with others came from. What he immediately concluded and came to understand, is that this desire came from afar. Probably sometime during gestation. At the beginning, this was merely intuition, but little by little Dr. A. Tomatis gathered together the elements which enabled him to support this idea, and then to check it. He tells how, one day in a work consisting of a thousand pages, he fell upon a sentence that seemed to confirm his hypothesis. Negus, an English author, had noticed that if the eggs of a songbird were brooded by a non singing bird, the birds hatched from that brood did not sing and vise versa. Still, the best finding was that, if the eggs are brooded by birds which sing, but in a different way, the hatchlings will sing the song of the bird that brooded them! One could thus think that audio-vocal conditioning is possible already at the egg stage. This is in fact what Konrad Lorenz was checking through his experiments. He spoke with eggs and noted thereafter that hatchlings born of these eggs turned their head towards him and precipitated to his side as soon as he spoke as if a secret and unbreakable bond existed between them based on communication through language. Butterflies are irresistibly attracted by light: that is known as a "tropism". So we see, in the case of the hatchlings mentioned above, there was a true phenomenon of tropism caused by the voice of Lorenz! Why should this not be true in humans? This time, it is a specialist studying infants that are in the nursing stage, André Thomas, who proves to him that he is on the right track, through his experimentation with these children and the use of their first names. Before the child is ten days old, they are made to sit, for example, on a table, and someone call out to the infant using his/her first name. The child does not really react until it is the child’s mother who calls out the name. At that time the infant moves his entire body towards the sound and thus falls to its side. This is quite obviously again a tropism. Comparing the two experiments, we see that Lorenz had spoken to the eggs and the hatchlings had reacted to the sound of his voice. We can deduct that the child reacts for much the same reason to the sound of his/her mother’s voice. The mother had spoken to the child when it was still an embryo. This is not necessarily to say that the mother conversed directly with the embryo but rather that the embryo has a close connection to the maternal voice and its localization. According to Dr. Tomatis: a mother, makes her child, gives it a nest within herself, nourishes it, prepares it for life through dialogue and communication which is the most important of these things. The fetus is aware of its mother due to the organic, visceral noises her body emits and most importantly by her voice. The child draws all the emotional substance from this voice which speaks... He is soaked and infiltrated by it. It is thus that he integrates his mother tongue. This is mans first audio-oral communication. Communication where the embryo (when all goes well), draws a sense of security. Consequently, Dr. Tomatis thought that the desire to communicate was in fact the desire not to severe, and was in fact a desire to build relationships with others through acoustics. The Voice We Yearn To Hear: For example from birth until maturity, the blooming of the ear is progressive. In addition, birth itself causes a fundamental modification in listening because the ear, adapted to the liquid medium of intra-uterine life, must abruptly adapt to the medium of air. According to Dr. Tomatis, before birth, the three parts of the ear, the external, the middle and the inner ears, are all acoustically adapted to the same frequencies, which lie mainly above 8,000 hertz. At birth, the first two stages of the ear, the outer and the middle ear, have to adapt to the surrounding air. The inner ear, however, retains its original state and continues to be a liquid filled chamber. The first few days following birth, leave the child in a state of transition as far as its ears are concerned. During the first 10 days after birth, the middle ear, and in particular the Eustachian tube, retain the amniotic fluid they had before birth, thus the middle and the inner ear remain adapted to the same frequencies. Around the tenth day, hearing starts to change. The Eustachian tube empties, and the infant loses its perception of the acute frequencies he was used to, and it can hardly hear for a time. Over the next few weeks the ears will need to readjust and accommodate for the new medium surrounding it now – air. The ears will need to retune around 300 – 800 hertz. The infant’s tympanic tension will have to normalize to accommodate for air enabling it to retrieve sound perception. The infant then recognizes the voice that had accompanied it all through gestation. The voice is transformed but the inflections are the same, the rate and rhythm, and will bond with it once again in this new environment. This voice is as necessary to our development as food. We wait for that voice as impatiently as we wait for the feeding-bottle. That voice is quickly associated with the maternal face, and will elicit small cries of joy or sorrow. Alfred Tomatis managed to determine the bandwidths that corresponded to each of the various stages of this development. He could reproduce intra-uterine listening in experiments using equipment that he built himself. He immersed a loudspeaker that he surrounded with rubber in water and connected it to a tape recorder and taped music and words through a microphone that he also placed in water. The results were enthralling, and so Dr. Tomatis assembled this in his laboratory and started telling people around him what he had done. Psychoanalysts started to listen to him as this equipment appeared to have great potential. As is often in the case in large studies, the most fertile discoveries often come from unforeseen consequences, that happen quite by accident. One day Dr. Tomatis was reflecting on a demonstration he had set up, using one of his clients. He had asked the client to let him know what he was going through during the demonstration. Quite by accident Dr. Tomatis set into motion the conditions necessary to perform a sonic birth which is the passage of listening through a medium of liquid to listening through the medium of air. They heard a child’s voice and realized it was his clients daughter who had sat down quietly in a corner and to whom they had not paid much attention. She seemed to be daydreaming the most extraordinary dream. She stated aloud that she was in a tunnel and could see two angels dressed in white at the end of the tunnel. The child’s father and Dr. Tomatis looked at each other, and Dr. Tomatis thought the child was visualizing its own birth, as if it were in the birth canal and saw at the other end the doctor and the midwife in their white scrubs! After a few minutes which appeared as a half-century to them, the child declared that she could now see her mother. There was no more possible doubt for Dr. Tomatis. The father’s, anguish was rising by the second as he asked her how she saw her mother, and she demonstrated. The child was nine years old at the time of this incident, and so it was quite impossible that she had made everything up. How does one explain a scene like this that is worthy of a fantastic fiction Movie? It had to be admitted that there was a close relationship between sonic birth and actual birth itself. The question then becomes is sonic birth capable of making a person relive their birth. He noted in addition that it was possible through the use of simple acoustic information, to get extremely intense psychological reactions. Could the power of this process be harnessed and controlled to deliberately cause certain effect on the psyche? Could a person be made to relive and thus work through psychological trauma? New territory to explore! Dr. Tomatis, a researcher at heart could not resist for long. Sound in the Mother-Infant-Father relationship: Today, everyone admits that the fetus hears. It is thus an established fact. What exactly it hears is still a mystery. Still, the essential point to recognize is that the fetus and even the embryo communicates with its mother, and possibly with its father as well. In order to understand the dynamics of the ear, it is necessary to evoke or simulate its embryological development, right as it starts developing in the belly of the mother. One could then decipher the sounds a fetus is likely to hear in uterus, which it will use later on to structure language until the point of what he hears at birth. The ear already starts forming in the first days life as an embryo. As early as the fifteenth Day, an auditory node can be seen to appear on the nervous system. From this will be formed the ear. By the third week this closes shut. By mid fourth week, it is already a blister ready to transform into the inner ear. At this point in time the entire embryo is only 6.3 mm. Dr. Tomatis believed that the embryo was already starting to hear. And indeed, when a client is subjected to intra-uterine hearing, they draw pictures that represent with absolutely disconcerting reality the uterine cavity. It is generally thought that the unit is not functional because there is no connection to the brain as yet, according to Dr. Tomatis this didn’t mean that the ear was not being imprinted with facts that it would compute once the nervous system was up and running. About the twentieth week, which is more of less half way through gestation, the inner ear is fully mature. It has achieved its final state, and will not grow any bigger. It will remain what it is at that time. At the same time under construction, in identical conditions and stages of development are the stirrup, the anvil and the stapes, which are the three tiny bones of the middle ear. At this point there exists the middle and inner ear that will not grow or change again. At 51/2 months gestation, the vestibular and the cochlea nerves which constitute the auditory nerve will myelanize, that is to say they will be fully functional to the nucleus, to later fully myelanize to the cortical area at birth. The auditory nerve is the only nerve that is completely and totally functional at birth. The eye will come later. As for the final development of the nervous system, it will not take place, in the field of associative fibers, before the 42 year. So we see a huge precession of the ear as compared to the whole nervous system. Let us switch over now to the cochlea. This cochlea contains an exceptional cell, called the organ of Corti, which is spread non-homogeneously along the cochlea. This is one of the keys to intra-uterine communication. The cochlea is 32 mms long, it is 100 times thinner on one side than on the other; this, to accommodate and perceive sounds that are high, medium and low, which are perceived in different parts of the cochlea. There are some cells in the low frequency area, there are slightly more cells in the medium frequency area, and there are about 24000 cells in the high frequency area. Listening to high frequencies has multiple effects. It stimulates the brain which needs stimulation to function. It is also responsible for our being able to stand upright against gravity. We have vertebrae to help us stand upright. If one soundproofs too much, the nervous system only perceives low frequency sounds, and the subjects subjected to this soundproofing slowly but surely get more and more tired, lethargic, they slump because they are not getting the frequencies necessary to recharge. On the other hand, it is necessary to think of the changes in posture of a pregnant mother. The belly moves forward and, little by little, significant tension with the spinal column is created as the vertebrae are connected to each other by ligaments and muscles in a very specific way. A veritable arc of sound will thus be formed so the mother’s voice can move through the vertebral column to reach the fetus. Also noteworthy is the fact that the diaphragm slightly changes its place. It is slightly lowered. This phenomenon is also found in great singers. Did you know that singing is easier for pregnant women than for others? Well that is why when a singer is pregnant she sings! Even more easily than what she is accustomed to. This can be explained by the fact that she is forced to hold herself in a certain way. She can no longer push to sing, and consequently, air flows naturally. On another note, let us look at the very beautiful work completed in the maternity of the hospital of Vesoul, in the East of France. They managed to show that when the mother speaks, the sound of her voice descends to the pelvis which acts as a resonator, thus the person can sing as loud as they possibly can not feel exhausted at all. The mother, thus has significant sonic communications with her unborn child. Dr. Tomatis had not yet succeeded in measuring any sound that the fetus possibly makes, but he was convinced that the fetus does emit sounds and that the mother hears these sounds on some level, instituting true dialogue between the two protagonists. In addition, let us look at another experiment that was repeated several times. A vibrator was placed on the belly of a woman and a probe was placed in an empty uterus. It was noted that that this required a lot of energy, between 110 to 115 decibels, in order for sound to be transmitted in a linear manner. What is interesting here is the question “Is the father’s voice able to penetrate through? Does music penetrate? Everything does penetrates but only through the use of high quantities of decibels. This is really a good thing! Luckily all mammalian fetus’ whose ears are already fully formed early in gestation do not hear everything, because if they did intra-uterine life would be impossible. The sound of the heart, stomach, breathing, movement and even noises made by the fetus itself. All this must make such a racket, it would be impossible to live in such an ambiance! In this case the ear acts as a filter, removing all sound below 2000 hertz. Take for example, the voice of a mother and lower it, the child immediately falls asleep because it lacks stimulation. If we want to energize it, give it a will to live, to communicate, then the mothers voice needs to filtered to the high frequencies before being transmitted. To ensure the message gets across correctly, it is necessary to find a way to make the 2 muscles of the middle ear work properly. The muscle of the hammer known as the tensor tympany and the muscle of the stirrup known as the stapidius need to be exercised appropriately in order to build them up to function properly. Tiny electronic shocks can bee used to open audition allowing the mothers voice to enter particularly through the bone. From that moment on, there is a transformation of the relationship between mother and child and there appears the desire to live and to listen. It can be thus noted that the voice of the mother is transmitted to the fetus in the uterine cavity. It is then time to concentrate on whether the father’s voice is also heard by the fetus. For Dr. Tomatis there was no doubt, this was most certain only it happened in a different manner through rhythms that are not those of the maternal voice. It is evident that the fetus is far more sensitive to the voice of its mother than to that of its father, whatever some researchers may think. The proof is seen when we transmit the mother’s voice filtered between 8000 and 12000 hertz to the new born infant through electronics the child immediately reacts. It decodes the sonic signals that seem incomprehensible to us. The child recognizes the ones inherent in the mother’s voice. It has a specific understanding of this voice that rocked him all through gestation. This is an important domain to research and explore because it holds the key to humanity in terms of primordial communication, which is paramount and essential during gestation and is the base of relational dynamics after birth. The mother thus floods the body of her child with the sounds which she emits and with those that she hears. The fetus’ entire nervous system will be impregnated with various sonic information. This is a task, the mother performs so well, that after having left this paradise the child continues a privileged form of communication with its mother. Dr. Tomatis notes that at a given time, the baby will express himself using “areu-areu” if he has a French ear, or “hé-hé-hé” if he is Italian, etc, i.e., according to the acoustics and ethnic medium to which he belongs. Later, another game will begin, the prattling which is created does not have semantic value at the beginning, even if the child articulates: "ma, ma, mama"; it is because the child is hungry and lengthens its lips in search of food, this motion forms the sounds "ma, ma'', On the other side of this coin if the child is not hungry when offered food or wants to reject the bottle, the child pulls its lips back and this motion forms the sounds: "Pa, Pa, Pa''. It is only later than the child will make this correlation: “Huh!, every time I make the sounds ma, ma, my mother shows up and every time I make the sounds Pa, Pa, my father shows up''. There is another interesting nuance to the above mentioned phenomenon, it is the tone used by the child when it uses these sounds. It is not "ma, ma” or '" Pa, Pa '' in a linear mode, but rather with intonation and rhythm that show him using his right or left ear to control himself. This is very significant because we are witnessing laterality being formed. Through out life this system of right-left will play a role in relational behavior. At the beginning everything related to the mothers is represented by both ears, but fairly quickly the right ear will become the one that controls language “paternal” ''that which uses "areu- areu" as the form of expression. The right ear will thus be the ear of the father, symbolically the solar image, that of becoming, while the left ear will remain symbolically allotted to the mother, to the past, the earth. Dr. Tomatis states that we would do well to remember that, Gargamelle gave birth to his child through his left ear!
While one is going through these different stages, the nervous system prepares to become responsible for the organization and structure of defined language The role of the ear in Human Development: Professor Alfred Tomatis, researcher, inventor, theorist, but above all therapist. His field of study and experimentation, his passion: the ear. It is perhaps true that he is not the root from which all knowledge stems, but what a crossroads anyhow! What a powerhouse! Looking in from the outside, it is quite difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, when presented with such an incredible man. Where does his capacities stop and legend begin? Skeptics and critics say none of what Dr. Tomatis claims is true, but on the other hand, his clients swear that he achieves miracles! None of this perturbed Dr. Tomatis who was well aware of the fact that there was no happy medium people could come to when it concerned him and his work, people either took him for a charlatan or for a Saint. Dr. Tomatis didn’t really care, he knew what he had discovered, and what he wanted to do with that information, and he also knew that it was well worth it. To be bothered by his critics and skeptics would be a waste of time for this great man, whose last book called “Education and Dyslexia'' is finally mobilizing the interest of specialists! Relieve fear first, then discuss. It is not necessary to be a psychologist to note that he has his feet firmly planted on the ground. He notes in his book that only the facts count. It is perhaps a principle that appears simplistic, but it is by staying true to these words that he was able to make all his discoveries. Dr. Tomatis, it must be said, belonged to that group of researches that discover! He found a few strange things, in truth, strange enough to astound the naive while at the same time offend the officials of science, anxious to preserve the truths of early scientists. In their eyes Dr. Tomatis is a man of delirious assumptions and embarrassing theories – those that bring scandal! There was clearly nothing he could do about this and so he chose to work and make deductions that were ever farther reaching based on intuitions he had years earlier that served as the basis for all his work. Dr. Tomatis lived through his ears, and often said “Tell me how you hear and I will tell you who you are, how you feel, how you react, how you suffer, how complex you are, how you sing, how you read, how you draw, how you think and even your department”. It is precisely this, which annoyed his adversaries, how could he with one single fact uncover and penetrate into so many different domains! Sure, one should be vary of integral solutions, of panacea, but for most it was not even that but rather the fact that he was infringing on their territory, which he did, Dr. Tomatis did not respect the private hunting grounds of others, he infringed on their taboos, and was thus in effect upsetting. Dr. Tomatis was not phased by this, and used Sigmund Freud’s belief that scientists have a duty to their science that is worth sacrificing a few touchy subjects for, to justify his behavior. At the start of his career, Dr. Tomatis was an ENT, he was however also the son of an opera singer, and that is what everything stemmed out of. One fine day, a friend of his father, who was also a singer, came to consult with him. Although the man was an artist of great standing, he had begun to sing off key. He had been to see a very famous Viennese voice specialist, who had diagnosed him as having a slack or lose larynx. Dr. Tomatis worked on trying to cure the man of what he had been diagnosed as having with all the available means of the day, that he had at his disposal as an ENT. And for two years Dr. Tomatis tried to retighten the man’s vocal cords. Finally, he thought he had succeeded as the singer’s voice seemed to have recovered its accuracy. Shortly thereafter however, the singer embarrassed himself by singing of key right on stage. A little later, he experienced the same failure with another singer. Other ENT’s might have been forever resigned to not being able to fix slack larynges, not so for Dr. Tomatis though, he looked for the lessons to be learnt from these failures. He determined that the larynx alone could not be responsible for singing correctly or not. So then, all that remained was to find the thing that was. Around that time, Dr. Tomatis was responsible for some acoustic testing being done in the Aeronautic Arsenals of France. He examined people who had experienced hearing loss while working on the test benches of super sonic aeronautics, in order to determine if they had to receive compensation for their loss. Based on his preliminary findings here, the similarities between the cases and his intuition, he decided to test the hearing of the two singers with the lose larynges, he theorized that the singers were damaging their ears through their singing. Even though this seemed absurd to even him, it turned out to be quite fruitful. Vocal emissions of a typical person do not exceed 80 decibels, An average professional singer, at around 3 feet distance emits at least 90 decibels. A large tenor emits 110, 120, and even 130 decibels! The problem is that this equates to about 150 decibels in cranium. A supersonic engine on the ground emits 132 decibels, granted there is a difference in energy, but the intensity still exists. It was thus logical for Dr. Tomatis to think that if these singers sang incorrectly, it was because they had injured their ears. From these findings and deductions he concluded that a person can vocally reproduced only that which he/she is able to hear “. This phenomenon was, in 1957, the subject of much discussion and interest at the National Academy of Medicine, and is known today as the "TOMATIS EFFECT”. It is scientific formulated as follows: “the larynx emits only those harmonics that the ear can hear". Dr. Tomatis puts it this way: “One speaks with one’s ears”. Already, at that time it became a small revolution. But Dr. Tomatis does not stop there. He decides it is now time to explore this from the opposite direction. He analyzed the recordings of large tenors, in order to get an idea of the way in which they heard during their life. He thus came up with the ideal listening curve based on the assumptions and determinations he made while listening to recordings of Caruso. He was well aware of that this did not stand the test of the essential scientific proofs, and would never, as the person was no longer living. Armed with the knowledge he had gleamed from this experiment he looked for other subjects to test this theory on and fortunately for him, his parents were close friends of another large singer: Benjamino Gigli. Dr. Tomatis had calculated the singer’s curve of listening a few years earlier. By comparing it to the curve obtained from the recordings, he notes a perfect coincidence. Another interesting find, and there would be more. If one examines the auditory curve of a singer, it shows that the control exerted on the voice differs from right to left ear. In fact, if noise in injected into the left ear of a singer while the singer is singing, there is no loss of voice quality, even an improvement! On the other hand, if one does the same to the right ears, deterioration of quality of voice is instant and very noticeable, this also applies to musicians and the way they play their instrument. The only possible conclusion then is that the right ear is the controlling or dominant ear. This means that solely, the right ear is able to ensure auditory and vocal control. If a musician is truly prevented from hearing on the right, the musician becomes unable to follow the tempo. Under these same conditions, the voice of the singer thickens, tarnishes and loses its accuracy. Some of the test subjects even started stammering. Dr. Tomatis claims that spanning his entire career he only met one left-handed singer, and he wasn’t convinced that the singer was truly left-handed. According to Dr. Alfred Tomatis, looking at any civilization, the left-handed person is the exception. It is in the interest of an individual, in evolution to evolved to being right-handed in order to be better adapted to the world. Dr. Tomatis deemed this to be necessary not only for the hand and the foot, but for hearing, speech and even thought! It is necessary to focus on the right side until the left side is able to follow and imitate it. If a singer starts to sing incorrectly, the singers right ear will need rehabilitation. Dr. Tomatis still needed to figure out the process of achieving this rehabilitation. Again, Dr. Tomatis would use Caruso to help him. Dr. Tomatis noted that Caruso’s ear showed a very particular characteristic, enabling him to hear primarily only sounds of good quality, profoundly dampening the bad quality sound. He decided to try and bestow Caruso’s ear or at least its astounding capability to people who had somehow injured their hearing. Dr. Tomatis managed to do this with the help of a helmet that he adapted to the cranium of the subject. The results were immediate, the subject became euphoric, started singing, and the subject is returned to normal. Upon removal of the helmet however the results are not very lasting. So the driving factor for Dr. Tomatis became making this a permanent improvement. Dr. Tomatis found it necessary to invent a machine that would teach the subject little by little how the listen as the great professional did. The research he undertook in this direction, gradually led to the development of adequate equipment, an invention made from bits and pieces of wire, a do-it-yourself contraption. The thing was manually controlled using noisy switches which in themselves constituted obstacles to the efficacy of the program. The first results were however, not discouraging. And very soon, his invention would benefit from the immense technological progress to come. Starting in 1954, with the introduction of electronic balancing, Dr. Tomatis’ contraption the artificial ear he had pieced together was able to function satisfactorily. Dr. Tomatis later named his invention the “Electronic Ear” and used it to perform his Method of sound stimulation. (This method is called today “Tomatis Method” by those who use the electronic ear and the Solisten machines and require longer periods of stimulation than the latest program called “Awaken Listening” or “Dynamic Listening” by those who use the more advanced computerized version of the electronic ear called Dynamic Listening System. To learn more about this 3rd generation equipment visit www.dynamiclistening.com). Dr. Tomatis system created the conditions necessary in order for the ear to be able to perform its function of listening. This is done by regulating tympanic tension through building the strength of the two muscles found within the tympanic cavity known as the stapidius and the tensor tympany, which through movement allow the passage of sound to the inner ear. That is where preliminary analysis of sound and language start their cellular relay of being decrypted. The equipment consists primarily of 2 channels joint by electronic balance one, conducting the subject of inefficient listening to efficiency while at the same time the other releases preferably the right auditory channel. This doesn’t mean that the left channel is eliminated only that it doesn’t provide the same level of vigilance necessary in listening. The unit consisted of a microphone, ear-phones, amplifiers used to regulate both channels, and a sound source of the highest quality used to play the tapes that Dr. Tomatis taped. The program lasted for ten minutes on the first day, twenty minutes the second day. By the end of one month, the subject emits sounds of professional quality because the subject has been conditioned to listen to himself. In the beginning stages of his discoveries, Dr. Tomatis was only concerned with helping singers either to remain or become masters of their art. The use of the equipment was thus rather confined. It was through a stroke of luck that Dr. Tomatis discovered the wide range of uses and potential of his equipment. One day, an actor went to consult with Dr. Tomatis on account of losing his voice. Dr. Tomatis had been recommended to him because he had formerly been a singer and Dr. Tomatis was known by then for his work with singers. Dr. Tomatis was not experienced with the voice actors, and therefore proceeded as he would have with a singer. That worked just fine and the actor started speaking normally again. That actor was Daniel Sorano and he is still remembered today for the beauty of his voice. During the course of his work Dr. Tomatis experimented on a subject by closing off the right ear in order to determine what effect this would have and heard the subject start stammering. This logically led Dr. Tomatis to wonder if people who stammered were not just simply people who had lost or never really achieved a dominant or directive ear. He tested his theory and found that certain subjects did not benefit from his program as it stood. These failures proved to him that his research needed to continue as there was still much to explore and understand. He continued with his experiments and small accidental findings led to great discoveries, connecting to each other to form a grand picture. A great strength of Dr. Tomatis was never to be satisfied with what he observed. He found it necessary to always extensively test the results of his observations and its theories. In 1954, several Venetian singers come to consult with Dr. Tomatis because they could no longer pronounce “R”. He figured it was because they could no longer hear themselves saying the “R” . This led him to wonder if there was an auditory selection that was specific to Venesians. This led him to theorize that if this were true then it would be true that the Milanes would have their own selection and the Napolitans would have their own auditory selection and so on. Thus, was born the idea that, each human group had a particular ear characterized by the groups specific band of selectivity. Further studies later confirmed this assumption. Dr. Tomatis noted, for example, that the Italian ear registered its selectivity between 2000 and 4000 hertz, whereas that of the French ear ranged between 1000 and 2000. From this grew the idea that it was this disparity that was the cause of difficulties in learning a foreign language. Experiments showed that certain children, skilled in all subjects but failing in English, are in fact deaf to the language, because of a particularly narrow auditory selection. Once relieved from this deafness and reeducated to listening to English frequencies, the results were spectacular. This was so successful that Dr. Tomatis was called upon to set up language learning centers. An unexpected and unsought but positive consequence of this was that children not only became good at English they improved their already good performance in the other subjects. The parents came to congratulate Dr. Tomatis and he noticed one common point made by them all. They all commented on how much better their child was reading. He did not need any further evidence to formulate yet another theory, the most surprising and difficult for skeptics of his work to accept. Dr. Tomatis states: “One reads with one’s ears”. Dr. Alfred Tomatis, claimed that the ear is the royal path to language. Dr. Tomatis maintains that written code is nothing by itself and requires sound to be reproduced, and can therefore be compared to a sound recording. Writing can be seen as the first form of recording sound that human genius devised for the storage of sound. Dr. Tomatis concluded that the ear is where the body houses all that is language even written language! Dr. Tomatis immediately, intuitively foresaw the practical use of this in dyslexia, There are a million and a half dyslexics in France. So once again, the results exceed his expectations. Not only did the children make progress in reading, but their speech and memory and concentration improved, they were more dynamic, and relaxed and simply much happier to be alive. According to Dr. Tomatis, an individual is a unit and one cannot touch the ear of that individual without touching that individual’s entire being, because the ear is bestowed with the job of director, it is responsible for us communicating with the surrounding world, other individuals and also with ouselves. It is possible that it conveys the fundamental emotional relationship between a mother and her child, when that individual is still unborn. The fact that this communication starts well before birth, has been established by psychoanalysts. Here is where Dr. Alfred Tomatis comes in. He brings to attention the assumption that when the relationship between the mother and the child was not establish in-utero, language is likely to remain unengaged or even nonexistent. The child will be born without language. The child can be brought to language through something called the “Sonic birth”, which is the passage of hearing through a medium of liquid as in the case of a fetus to hearing through a medium of air as once born.
Learn More about Dr. Alfred Tomatis and his research through the following books he has written: In English: The Conscious Ear Education and Dyslexia The Ear and Language The Ear and the Voice In French: L'Oreille et le Langage Education et Dyslexie La Libération d'Oedipe Vers L'Ecoute Humaine I et II L'Oreille et la Vie La Nuit Utérine L'Oreille et la Voix Les Troubles Scolaires Vertiges Neuf Mois au Paradis Pourquoi Mozart? Nous sommes Nés pour Parler toutes les Langues Ecouter l'Univers Robert Laffont, 1991 |
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