New theories on auditory physiology (2nd APP Congress, 1972)

Lecture given by Prof. Alfred Tomatis on Saturday 13 May 1972 at the 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology held in Paris from 11 to 14 May 1972, and published in the Proceedings of the Congress on pages 163 to 187. In twenty-five dense pages, Tomatis traces the genesis of the Electronic Ear since 1947 and sets out the theoretical foundations of a new auditory physiology. The present page presents the table of contents and the verbatim conclusion of the lecture; the full text is not reproduced here because the congress printing, duplicated by typewritten stencil, presents degradations that make a faithful verbatim transcription impossible from the scan alone.

Lecture by Professor Tomatis

“New theories on auditory physiology — Application of the Electronic Ear”

Prof. Alfred Tomatis
Paris Language Centre

2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Paris, Saturday 13 May 1972 — Proceedings of the Congress, pp. 163-187.

Foreword (p. 163, transcribed verbatim)

“It is intentionally that the SECRAP has wished this part of the Congress to be open to all — open so that further information may be disseminated on the new data of the physiology of the ear; open so that discussions may spring from this meeting and bring some clarification on the problem of Audio-Psycho-Phonology.

Before broaching the physiology proper, however, I think it would be well to present briefly a historical sketch of the experimental approach that presided over the development of that famous machine, the Electronic Ear.”

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Thematic summary of the lecture (pages 164-186)

The following sections correspond to the main articulations identifiable in the lecture from a reading of the pages of the congress printing. The detail of the text is not reproduced here, the available scan not permitting a faithful verbatim transcription.

Genesis of the Electronic Ear (1947). Tomatis’s direction of the acoustic physiology laboratory of the Aeronautics Arsenals; mission to study the auditory damage of workers exposed to noise; finding that “a subject plunged into noise loses his listening and still hears but no longer understands anything”.
The French audiometer of 1933 and the early work on professional singers.
The Tomatis Effect. Audio-vocal counter-reactions, parallelism between the audiometric examination and the envelope curve of the spectral analysis of the voice; taken up by Raoul Husson in 1957 at the instigation of Professor Monnier in the Laboratoire de Physiologie des Fonctions at the Sorbonne, who grouped these phenomena under the name of the “Tomatis Effect”.
The Caruso-type phonation and the “cortical recharge”. Study of exceptional voices, high harmonics up to 14 kHz, parallel with the soundboard of the Stradivarius.
Audio-vocal conditioning: two-channel circuit switched by gating, already presented to the Académie nationale de médecine in 1960.
Auditory laterality. Importance of a right-side directing ear for audio-vocal regulation.
The integration of foreign languages. Acoustic and linguistic “passbands” proper to each language; applications at the Centre Audio-Visuel of the École Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud and in several lycées in France.
From Pavlov to the neuro-psycho-physiology of the ear. Audio-vocal conditioning reawakens a pre-existing regulation inscribed in the very physiology of the auditory system; since 1951 Tomatis has proposed to make of it a true neuro-psycho-physiology.
The limits of the auditory physiology of the 19th century (Helmholtz); curves of equal intensity, equivalence sensitivity, measurements at the C.N.E.T. in an anechoic chamber.
The threefold function of the ear. Vestibular (balance, vertical posture); cochlear (audio-vocality, cortical recharge, Stanley Jones’s experiment); vegetative (pneumogastric branch: heart, bronchi, viscera, emotion).
Embryology. Three cerebral vesicles; appearance of the cochlea in the third foetal month; fluid middle ear in utero; rupture of the great dark hole at the first cry.
Audio-vocal mother-child communication in utero and its role in the subsequent investment of language.
Phylogeny. Lateral line of fish → reptilian otolith → mammalian cochlea → bi-use of the human ear for language, without which “humanisation becomes impossible”.

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Conclusion (p. 187, transcribed verbatim)

“This kind of linguistic telescoping takes place at the beginning of the child’s life, as he begins to stand. And it is when he takes his first steps, when he begins to move about in space, that the sentence enters and that the verb appears. His ‘I’ is then involved in a permanent manner. In reality, it is his ego, ego-object, his existent ego that intervenes, for it alone counts. His universe is purely egocentric. Then, little by little, he becomes aware that the other exists, that the other-object also exists, and a kind of decentralisation of his ego takes place. He is seen creating other objects than himself; everything else will become alongside him a kind of complement; grammar will at last be structured and take its true place.

But grammar is essentially neuronic. The difficulty will therefore be, for the linguist, to consider the different stages of language and to know that with one and the same language the nervous system of a 12-year-old child will not say the same thing as that of a man of 30, who in turn will not mean the same thing as a man of 50. Psychoanalysis is there to give us the structures of the signification of each of the terms in accordance with what is lived and with the analysis of the structure of this lived experience. And the ultimate language will be that which will allow us to speak without any psychoanalytic projection. I think that this language will then be very near to silence — that silence which I shall now attempt to make.”

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Source: Tomatis A., “Conférence du Professeur Tomatis — Nouvelles théories sur la physiologie auditive — Application de l’Oreille Électronique”, in Actes du II^e Congrès International d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, Paris, 11-14 May 1972, pp. 163-187. Document digitised from the personal archives of Alfred Tomatis. The present publication reproduces only the pages legible in extenso (title page p. 163 and conclusion p. 187) together with a summary of the themes identified; the full text remains available from the archives.