Research on the Tomatis Effect
Research on the Tomatis Effect — Discussion of Dr A. E. Sidlauskas's paper (Ottawa) — 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Paris (1972)
Fourth communication of the Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology (Paris, 11-14 May 1972), held on Friday 11 May under the chairmanship of Professor Tomatis. The Proceedings do not reproduce the actual paper by Dr A. E. Sidlauskas (University of Ottawa), but the debate that followed it. Taking part in turn are: a listener, Dr Sidlauskas, Prof. Tomatis, Mr Dubard (Nice Centre), Mme Joanny (Nancy Centre) and Dr Spirig (Nieuwpoort Centre, Belgium). The themes broached are the so-called dichotic digits test and its correlation with audio-laterometry according to Tomatis, right hemispheric dominance, the hyper-right and hyper-left psychotypes, the danger of a dethroning of the right directing ear, the comparative methodology (“non-Tomatis” control group), the limits of statistical control in clinical matters, the necessity of joining to the Electronic Ear other methods (speech therapy, psychomotricity, psychoanalysis, graphology), and lastly the application to bilingual learning — Canadian English, Belgian Flemish — and the question of the paternal language as the language of address to the child.
Discussion of Dr A. E. Sidlauskas’s paper (Ottawa) on “Research on the Tomatis Effect”
Debate chaired by Professor Tomatis
2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology — Paris, 11-14 May 1972 — Proceedings pp. 62-72.
On measurement: dichotic digits and audio-laterometry
A listener. — How does one obtain dichotic digits?
Dr Sidlauskas. — To obtain dichotic digits, one must have at one’s disposal the necessary material and the recorded tapes.
Is there a correlation between the dichotic test and audio-laterometry à la Tomatis? I say yes. On the other hand, I should like to specify that it is much easier to carry out an experimentation from dichotic digits than with laterometry according to Tomatis. The latter is very complex, as are moreover all the clinical data that relate to it. We have attempted to verify the presumption that the preferential ear determined by dichotic digits was an index of right hemispheric dominance, but it was a far too crude deduction for us to retain it.
Prof. Tomatis. — Dichotic tests consist in sending simultaneously to one ear and the other non-identical information. The test is carried out with numbers of increasing complexity, made first of a single digit and then of two, then of three — that is to say, increasingly difficult to perceive and to memorise. The subject thus hears these different pieces of information at the level of each of the ears, and he must repeat the digits he has heard. One then measures the percentage of errors on the right and the left, and one studies the balance between the two categories of results, that is to say right and left. I do not think, contrary to what Dr Sidlauskas has told us, that this test is easier to interpret than that of audio-laterometry. It is not easy to carry out, and the clinical data relating to it are complex; what is still more important, when one knows how to operate audio-laterometry properly, the fixing of the level of auditory dominance is easy to carry out.
Hyper-rights and hyper-lefts
Prof. Tomatis. — I should like now to take up what Dr Sidlauskas indicated to us concerning the case of the “hyper-rights” and the “hyper-lefts”. This is a very important remark which raises the essential problem of laterality, that is to say of the harmony that must exist between the right and the left of the human being. It is quite true that, when one is hyper-right, one risks being psychotic; one sees that face is very frigid and is extremely cleft, hyper-acute; sometimes he utters strident cries. One may say that he has wholly rejected his left, with what it represents: tenderness, low frequencies, roundness. It is really the impression that he is not to be seen penetrating into his body, with which he refuses to dialogue. These hyper-right-handed psychotics have a passband of usual language, a language without body, without structure, a “fleshless” language, and would have no bodily resonance in them or in those they have to address. There is no possibility of physical, acoustic transmission through the body.
And this other tendency of the “hyper-lefts” who are encountered among the very deeply depressed and among neurotics who have decided not to enter into relation with the other. In this case, the voice aggravated, pronounced, even moderate; it lacks high harmonics, it lacks tonicity; it calls on sounds of discharge that compel the one who listens with this “hyper-left” voice to expend, but the voice instead of acting outside the usual dialogue zone, and this shift characterises the state of counter-rotation.
It is very important to know how to look at a face in order to know the control circuits of an individual. If one speaks to the right, one may deduce that he uses his right ear to audio-control himself; if he speaks to the left, it is the reverse, and one understands that one needs the possibility of having the expression of a subject change during a dialogue, which will bring into play the symbolic representations of right and left, the fact of speaking with the tender voice. You may for instance see a child speaking of his mother; he will be seen reorienting himself towards the tender voice, on the left, but then with an aggravated voice. If you then speak to him of his father, you will see him pass to the right (and at that moment his voice hardens, the voice becomes dynamic, the expression becomes more precise). Each of us can moreover play at will with the distances corresponding to the right voice and the left voice.
Danger of a dethroning of the directing ear
Prof. Tomatis. — It is very interesting to see the being lateralising himself under Electronic Ear and becoming, as I often amuse myself in saying, right-handed all the way to the left. This expression is meaningful because it expresses my thought well. Indeed, to become right-handed does not mean to abandon the left; it means to become right-handed all the way to the left. That is why, moreover, I always advise setting on the Electronic Ear the “balance” knob at 1°, that is to say 90% of the sonic energy going to the right ear and 10% to the left, and never at zero (exceptional cases aside). There must be, as Dr Sidlauskas was recalling, harmonisation between the two sides and not domination of one side over the other. The right and the left have different functions, two different roles to play. The right is the dynamic factor and the left the instrumental factor. Both are indispensable. One needs a well-tuned instrument so that the virtuoso may play it. Thus the right — that is to say, the dynamic side — will play the left — that is to say, the instrumental side — and it is the harmonisation of this play that must be aimed at. By lateralising to the right, one shall give right to a summary and in a somewhat lapidary way: hyper-right, hyper-left, these are psychotic in being from their body. That is where the danger lies. As soon as there is cleavage of one side of the body, there is disorder. One could thus say, in a summary and somewhat lapidary way: hyper-right, surely psychotic; hyper-left, surely neurotic.
I have seen certain people deviate at a given moment, explode, abandon their body and become hyper-right-handed. It happened to me, not long ago, to note this in a young man I know who underwent very strong and very traumatising aggressions during psychodrama sessions. He was literally falsified from his body and he exploded.
Dr Sidlauskas. — We have observed that hyper-right-handers are much more difficult to re-educate than the others. They are individuals who enjoy their role — that is to say, their hyper-right-handedness — in the world of business and objects. They take pleasure in it and have no inkling that they are unbalanced. They feel no malaise.
The Ottawa Centre: other techniques and place of the Electronic Ear
Mr Dubard (Nice). — What other techniques do you use in your Centre?
Dr Sidlauskas. — We have, in our Centre, installations permitting the application of therapies of all kinds — that is to say, individual therapies of an analytic type, but also group therapies. We also carry out scholastic re-education by means of pedagogical methods specific to our establishment. The child is thus introduced into a school setting and entrusted to specialised staff. He is therefore not only exposed to the Electronic Ear but also to milieu therapies.
Prof. Tomatis. — I should like to add something: there is no equivalent in France of what one can see in America, in the United States or Canada, as far as experimental centres are concerned. The one at Ottawa, directed by Dr Sidlauskas, was one, and it had everything necessary to produce results that could be quantified on the teaching and research planes. It is essentially a research and teaching centre where everything is at an experimental stage, where all techniques are tried in order to verify the results and draw conclusions. It is certain that the data from the experimentation are not always sufficiently well specified, due to the fact that one person alone cannot, in a few years, come to a deep knowledge of what requires, in fact, time and techniques that are sufficiently tested and have become very numerous in our years of work. Thus, when the experimentation was conducted at Ottawa with a “non-Tomatis” control group and a group of children submitted to the Electronic Ear, an error slipped in due to the fact that headphones were placed on the control group. Even when the gating was not brought into play, by setting everything to zero, a counter-reaction was nevertheless awakened. That is to say that, in wishing to suppress one parameter in the experimentation (the headphones, by placing the control group and the experimental group under headphones), another parameter was introduced that surely distorted the results.
In my opinion, the experimentation would have been more valid, and one could have compared the first group (without any intervention of apparatus) with the second group submitted to the Electronic Ear. Certain parameters could have been brought to light in a much more perceptible way.
Dr Sidlauskas. — Yes, but you know that the Americans, when they carry out experimentations, require the homogeneity of their subjects?
Prof. Tomatis. — Yes, of course, I understand perfectly. One can establish statistics with well-determined data. But the fact that you addressed these children, who were intellectually very little gifted, situated at 130 and below, introduces important phenomena of compensation. Everyone knows that we have thirteen billion cortical cells at our disposal and that the one who is at zero will serve to correct the distortions brought by the function of distorting the results of an experimentation. Whatever the case, I do not think one should be polarised so intensely on statistics, all the more so as the results are not always the mirror of reality. To me, it seems indispensable to seek to help the child out of the impasse in which he finds himself rather than leave him in the corridor where the “computer” descends and comes out green or red. To be sure, I find myself before a large number of American children, and I find myself before a group of researchers who rack their brains for years to determine a statistic, to give a few parameters allowing a hyper-specialised study, without concerning themselves with all the children who might benefit from the apparatuses on the basis of which statistics would then be made.
Research, clinical Centre and complementary methods
Prof. Tomatis. — I am of course above all a therapist, but this attitude does not exclude research, quite the contrary. I remain moreover convinced that one does much more research by treating cases than by abstract experiments where one does not stand back into a position of objective depth in reasoning about details or therapeutic data. That is what, in my view, is the helper when one finds. That is why I have much difficulty in adapting myself to this scientific psychology of laboratories by paying attention to the fact in relation to man. One has sought to draw conclusions of a mathematical and statistical order. Dr Sidlauskas has a Latin training, living in the American milieu. She must of course meet the imperatives of statistical measurements. She must restrain her therapeutic impulses (which I know very well in her, and I understand perfectly) to leave room for objective studies that break the heart through the research of the methods employed.
Since we have the good fortune of having in the room our sympathetic friend Janette, young and brilliant psychologist of base power, I take the occasion to specify that this law of statistics is needed. And it is only chosen by the latter, by the imperatives of experimentation, that one must reach not knowing any more where one will be. If he has not the use of the new “computer” that will come out of the University of Ottawa, he will be completely desperate. He stops his research and takes another direction. I emphasise this often on this subject. That said, I am not a priori against statistics. I say that I advocate a control suited and brought, but that it form part of research, of very objective data which one often needs.
I should recall here that I also attempted, several years ago, to try within several techniques to increase the efficacy of help to be brought to the child in difficulty. We then attempted to join to our methods of audio-vocal education psychomotricity, psychoanalysis, re-education, speech therapy, graphology, and so on. Linked and complementary, as we had believed them complementary, the doubling means, in my opinion, to give you an idea of attack or approach, was doubling the evolution of children. That means in the final analysis that certain techniques act in the opposite direction to certain others and neutralise this global experimentation; one would certainly have obtained more meaningful figures. When one mixes several techniques together, one ends up no longer knowing who did what, who did what, that one points out by the Electronic Ear in the decorticating atmosphere of the Ottawa Centre, which has always been in the impossibility of pinpointing and drawing a teaching from the cases that can really bring our techniques, and that hampers research, as you can imagine. It would be preferable, in my view, to know with precision what one is doing, in the hope of adding the effects for a better yield. I am sure that perhaps we should use “bausian” techniques that concern all these millions of parameters and these 13 billion cortical cells. The experimentations are therefore very difficult to conduct. They are, for several years, an experiment with the ear, and to do something spectacular for that to do entirely, on the basis of the interesting results I have been able to obtain with the Electronic Ear, it has been possible to make research advance considerably on auditory physiology and on many other planes. I think even, under these conditions, I can propose that true statistics be interpreted with only a few parameters.
That does not mean that other techniques are not valid. They have, to be sure, their utility, but one must apply them under certain well-defined conditions and according to the cases. What is it good for, in my view, to add them to one another? What is certain is that one has first to be done is to realise the relation of the child with his mother, his father, his environment — is to restore to him the desire to communicate, the desire to live. Then one can apply all the methods of integration, all the bodily techniques, of motor coordination, and so on. Everything will pass, including and especially schooling.
Mme Joanny’s question — spatial curves and percentages
Mme Joanny (Nancy). — What are the spatial curves observed?
Prof. Tomatis. — There are no curves in dichotic tests; they are figures one obtains. One will say, for example, that the subject has 20% errors on the right, 30% errors on the left.
With audio-laterometry, they are also figures one obtains. But these figures measure the dynamic of one ear with respect to the other. It is more usual to seek this dynamic, which is somewhere rather difficult to make a burst that veils, through the listener. Audio-laterometry allows one to visualise it and to render it natural, where we already know how to detect by simple observation of the face, by listening to the voice, by laughter. We know, thanks to this test, at what level, at what percentage, laterality is fixed in the dynamic function on one ear and on the other.
Tonal audiometry and psycho-analytic reactions under EE
Dr Sidlauskas. — If the audiometric curve is too high in the low frequencies, we have also found ourselves at frequencies where the dichotic tests, the subject is more anxious. It is also said that selectivity is blocked on the audiometric most, the reporting of figures in dichotic is also blocked, so that one sees the problem of preferential selectivity to establish these dichotic digits. Generally we have a very blocked selectivity on one ear, the other ear is also noted then in the same way in dichotic. The subject is caught in the trap of the perceiver, as I have just said, that the listening to low frequencies is preponderant in relation to the small numbers obtained in dichotic tests. Moreover, it is not important for us to know the number of digits a child has brought us. What is essential is to know the relation between left and right — is to know the percentage.
Prof. Tomatis. — You remember that the subject always has underlying psychoanalytic reactions, and when he is caught in the trap of the Electronic Ear, he reacts sometimes by closing his selectivity. On the other hand, if you open this strong selectivity, he may react in another way, by lowering the threshold of auditory acuity. You then see a lowering of 10, 20, 30 dB, sometimes more, in a manner moreover unequal from one ear to the other. You can also note, by way of refusal, a passage to the left on the plane of auditory laterality. One obtains therefore these results that are found in dichotic. One obtains therefore the same things.
Bilingualism: Canada and Belgium
Dr Spirig (Nieuwpoort). — You live in Canada, a bilingual country, as we do in Belgium. I should like to know whether you have observed differences in the speed of reaction of children to re-education. I note, for my part, that the Fleming reacts less rapidly than a French-speaker; I also note that the Fleming reacts less rapidly than a French-speaker: selectivity opens fairly quickly; second, he reacts less rapidly to the maternal voice. Many more maternal voice sessions must be done than for a child speaking French. The need that we asked, during the period of French sibilants, I had not passed enough maternal voice, and I had not been too early to enter into language. What do you think?
Dr Sidlauskas. — My personal expression, on visiting Dr Spirig’s Centre, was: “My God, how these Flemings speak Spanish!” I think the problem is very different in the United States and in Canada. I do not believe there is a great difference of frequencies in the two Canadian languages; Canadian French and Canadian English are comparable to French of France, no more than Canadian English is comparable to English of Great Britain.
As for our population, I must admit that our sample is not representative of the general population. However, basing our judgement on our experience, it seems to us that the linguistic differences are above all due to the affective characteristics and the social roles due to these groups. The Canadian French child, as in our experience, is socially marked; he is inferiorised to such a degree that he is hostile. He is notorious for learning English because he knows the imperious necessity of acquiring this language. By contrast, Canadian English has assurance; he is master of the situation; learning French does not interest him.
Prof. Tomatis. — I should like to add a word to what Dr Sidlauskas has just said, since I have had the good fortune to study these bilingual groups — French-English in Ottawa and Flemish-French in Nieuwpoort.
As regards Canadian bilingualism, it is easy to note that the contribution of the high frequencies of the English language makes Canadian English much more tonic, much more prudent, much more master of language. It is moreover interesting to note that, by the air and by the other language, there is convergence towards the frequency of 1,500 Hz, which is the frequency at which the Canadian air vibrates very effectively. Each of the two languages is perceptibly modified by this contribution of air resonance. You remember that the air has been called the medium of transmission; it is the ambient air with all its physical, resonant, acoustic characteristics, and so on. And I think the error of the Canadians is to wish to speak their English language pure as at Oxford and their French as in Paris. It is impossible that the Canadian soil, which makes them speak in a certain way that is found among Canadians who vibrate to another mother tongue, in a specific language. Sooner or later one will arrive at a Canadian language, a national language, a real spoken frequential language.
As for Dr Spirig’s Centre, I could not make certain observations relative to the Flemish language and to the Flemings seen from the knowledge I had of them. The first time I went to consult at Dr Spirig’s, I thought I would do a consultation as at home in Paris. In this work, I scarcely realised that the reactions of the Flemish children did not escape me at all (because those of children speaking French in Paris). It seemed to me impossible with the Flemings; and between Flemings — so much did they seem equal in their language. Their voice is aggravated; it lacks high harmonics, all the more so as the response of the Flemings is much longer than that of the French, and they have also that to which the English belongs. So we agreed, Dr Spirig and I, to put the children into English audition in order to try to awaken them. The imposition of the slope –5 +5 on the upper channel (characteristic of the English language) under Electronic Ear helped them considerably and toned them up, which allowed them to resolve more rapidly their problems of learning and integration of their own language.
Methodology: recording the maternal voice, Flemish sibilants
Dr Spirig. — In Belgium, parents are often bilingual, and even sometimes, during her pregnancy, the mother speaks French and Flemish. What should one do in these conditions?
Prof. Tomatis. — The best is first to record her voice by asking her to read a text in the language she speaks most easily, that is to say her mother tongue, where one is sure to find the best intonations, the best affective charge. Then one filters the tape at 8,000 Hz to realise the intra-uterine listening, and one plays the M.V. for a certain time. Then you can have Filtered Music heard and introduce the child into language by playing Flemish sibilants (preferably filtered) and Flemish texts, but always with the setting of maximum slope of analysis, that is to say with the upper channel set at –5 +5.
Dr Spirig. — For a child who speaks French at home and goes to a Flemish school, what solution should be adopted on the linguistic plane?
Prof. Tomatis. — I think one must be very strict on this point. It is an important linguistic problem that must receive very particular attention.
If one of the parents or both have a French paternal language, they must speak French to the child, and not express themselves in Flemish necessarily with a bad accent and a false linguistic posture. At school, the child will speak in Flemish with a Flemish teacher and Flemish schoolmates. There will therefore be no distortion at the level of intonation, of grammatical syntax, of vocabulary, and so on; and so the child will be able to evolve with ease in each of the languages: French at home and Flemish at school. He will thus not confuse the two channels and will be able to do the dispatching. There will not be that disastrous confusion that exists in certain foreign families who wish at all costs to express themselves in the language of the country where they live and who wish to address their children in this language on the pretext of helping them to integrate it more easily. It is a gigantic error. They cause in reality only distortions to be integrated, which will considerably hamper the child in the acquisition of the said language.
I am now dealing with many children from an international lycée in the Paris region. Many difficulties arise from the fact that parents wish to speak French at home in order to help the child learn this language. The result is a brochette of dyslexics whom we are obliged to re-educate seriously by urging the parents to speak to them in their own paternal language. There is even, for some of these children, a problem of trilingualism — the father being for instance Dutch, the mother German, and the school milieu French.
We encounter the same difficulties in Paris with the Spanish population, capable of being poorly integrated into Paris because of a French fact. We are obliged to invite these Spanish parents in family, where they automatically reply: “But in that case how will they ever learn French?” The parents must of course encourage in French but when it is a question of desire, but when it is a question of children, to impress young neuronic networks, and to code systems of integration, no linguistic distortion must be admitted.
Language learning and the organisation of the personality
A listener. — Regarding language learning, we have noted that the children who did not progress were always those with important psychological problems.
Dr Sidlauskas. — I think that is correct. One must think of studying, in these children, what is called the organisation of the personality. A personality could indeed be more cultivated and thus permit a better linguistic integration. I am often curious of the fact that I do not always find gifted children who well that are the good ones. One does not know what I may think, as that possible, cultivate in them, or could one say that one possesses, one suffers from a nature of persons of another sort. Learning is important in favour of curiosity; it is the search, the enrichment; for learning languages, it is the desire; the me is the means, but the Americans among experience little blackmail that never stops; so, there is little blackmail of learners either; it is a continent that never ceases.
Prof. Tomatis. — To take up what Dr Sidlauskas was saying about availability for learning a language, it is certain that the affectivity factor plays an important role, especially in the young child, who can be taught directly from the paternal language. The child of 3 to 5 who cannot learn a second language has very often affective blockages with regard to the paternal language. Later, this difficulty may be due to a linguistic conditioning excluding the listener in a determining narrow passband and preventing listening from going into the frequency zone of the language to be acquired. French, for example, is fixed in a frequency zone so narrow that it remains closed to the learning of other languages and especially to the integration of the English language, which begins where French ends. We know that the Frenchman is rather poor in this respect, that he is little gifted for languages.
It is therefore a question, for the adult, not of a psychological, affective problem, but rather of a cultural, psycho-linguistic problem. The ethnic ear, being fixed in a determined passband, cannot accede to the perception of the sounds contained in a foreign language. That is why audio-vocal education performed under Electronic Ear can be of great use, by allowing listening to walk in other ethnic zones.
Conclusion
Prof. Tomatis. — Before closing, I should like to specify that Dr Sidlauskas, who admitted just now, during a conversation, to having a very imperfect ear, seems to be fairly gifted on that side. She comes from a country of Europe where one hears well, and above all she possesses an intelligence beyond limits. I think that intelligence, will, dynamism, the will to become, faith — these are indeed the same thing.
That is what I had to add. It remains only to congratulate Dr Sidlauskas and to thank her for what she has brought us on the plane of research.
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Source: Actes du IIe Congrès International d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, Paris, 11-14 May 1972, pp. 62-72 — “Discussion à propos de l’exposé du Dr A. E. Sidlauskas (Ottawa) sur Recherche sur l’effet Tomatis”, debate chaired by Professor A. Tomatis. Document digitised from the personal archives of Alfred Tomatis. The transcription has been established as close as possible to the source text; certain turns of phrase carry the typing and OCR defects of the original printing, which have intentionally not been smoothed.