Music and the Child

Communication by Professor Alfred Tomatis at the 1st Regional Music Symposium held at Pierrelatte from 11 to 14 May 1972, presented by Madame Marie-Louise Aucher, founder of Psychophony. At Pierrelatte, Tomatis sets out, before an audience of musicians and educators, his conception of music as the principal mode of the bodily and linguistic education of the child — from intra-uterine communication with the mother’s voice to the school learning of reading, writing and foreign languages. A plea for the intensive reintegration of music and singing into kindergartens, nursery school and primary teaching.

Communication by Professor A. TOMATIS at the 1st Regional Music Symposium
Pierrelatte, 11 to 14 May 1972

Presentation of Prof. Tomatis’s paper by Madame Marie-Louise Aucher.

Presentation by Madame Marie-Louise Aucher

Madame Aucher first recalls the work of Alfred Tomatis since 1947 on the relations between hearing and vocal emission, his thesis on Occupational Deafness (Lallema et Maduro, 1952), and then the formalisation by Raoul Husson in 1957, under the name of the “Tomatis Effect”, of the audio-phonatory counter-reactions Tomatis had isolated.

She evokes the gradual development of the Electronic Ear, a device capable of modifying at will the way in which a subject hears, by filtering, by gating between channels, and by auditory return on vocal emission; and the discovery that this counter-reaction acts as much on the spoken and sung voice as on posture, motor control, and the learning of foreign languages.

She lastly stresses the importance of filtered sounds and of the mother’s voice as heard by the foetus in the amniotic fluid — the cornerstone of the audio-vocal pedagogy developed by Tomatis — and introduces the project of an International Congress, the idea of which was put forward by M. Guibert, on precisely the theme of Music and the Child.

Paper by Professor Tomatis

I. — Music, principal mode of bodily education

Music constitutes, in my view, the principal mode of bodily education. It integrates at once rhythms and time, and all that pertains to verticality, to space, to the postural organisation of the human being. On this twofold terrain — temporal and spatial — the first structures of motricity, of sensibility and finally of language take root.

II. — The living ambient air: sounds of charge and of discharge

The air around us is not only the mechanical vehicle of sound waves: it is a living medium, with which our whole body is in permanent relation. The sounds we capture in it divide, according to their effect on the organism, into “charging” sounds, which recharge the being with energy, and “discharging” sounds, which on the contrary consume it.

Music penetrates the child not only through the ear, in the narrow sense in which this term designates the auditory nerve alone, but through the whole skin. The body is a global sonic receiver, and it is the whole body that is educated by music.

III. — The two functions of the ear

The ear performs two great functions, which it is well to distinguish. The first is the function of balance, ensured by the vestibule and the vestibular fibre of the auditory nerve. The second, less often recognised, is the function of cortical recharge: the sound stimuli collected by the cochlear nerve supply the cerebral cortex with energy and maintain wakefulness.

But the ear is not a passive organ. It opens and closes according to the states of mind of the subject; it listens, and it can also refuse to listen. And it is far more than a mere auditory nerve: it constitutes, with its vestibular, cochlear and cutaneous extensions, a true centre of global processing of sound information.

IV. — The three pillars of the human being

Three principal pillars support the human structure:

The first is the pneumogastric nerve (the Vagus, the 10th cranial pair), which innervates the tympanic membrane. This nerve is asymmetrical, and from this asymmetry proceeds in large part our laterality.

The second is the auditory nerve taken as a whole, and in particular on the cochleo-vestibular plane. Through the vestibular fibre, it ensures balance and, in man, verticality. All the anterior roots of the spinal cord benefit from an intervention of the auditory nerve, so that in the gestural domain not one posture escapes its control. One thus better understands the contribution of sound on the plane of motricity and of bodily plasticity.

The cochlear nerve ensures a great part of the cortical recharge thanks to the stimuli it collects on the organ of Corti in its richest cellular zone. Let us recall that the distribution of the cells of Corti on the basilar membrane is not homogeneous: rare in the zone of low sounds, the cells become very numerous in the zone of the high sounds. That is why low sounds carry along the body without recharging it, while high sounds energise it while supplying it with energy.

The third pillar of this human structure is the skin, which the cochleo-vestibular organisation holds under its sway. It is above all sound-sensitive on the anterior face of the face, the trunk, the belly, and on the inner side of the arms, the forearms, the hands, the legs.

V. — Laterality, right circuit, left circuit

The two ears, and beyond them the two hemispheres, no longer have the same functions, nor the same attributions, thus translating different activities on the two cortical areas, right and left.

There will be a right circuit, short, and a left circuit, long, by virtue of which the spatial distribution of sounds becomes possible — as moreover represented by musical instruments, with low sounds (of long wavelength) on the left, and high sounds (of shorter wavelength) on the right. In the same way, we shall find in human expression a right voice and a left voice. The one that uses the right circuit will be modulated, timbred, alive, whereas the one that takes the left path will be dull, white and lifeless.

VI. — The choice of music

The choice of music to be offered is at once simple and complex. The most appropriate, the most enriching, are those that recharge the individual with energy, as may the sacred sounds, which at the same time ensure posture and the maximum cortical charge.

Mozart remains, it seems to us, the great chosen one among the musicians capable of awakening this energisation. He stimulates our young neuronic codings by sounds evoking the harmonic richness of the child’s listening, before the saturation due to the traces of existence intervenes. The works of this composer have been chosen by us from so many others by reason of the exceptional results obtained in our work on “filtered sounds”.

Within our techniques of audio-vocal education under Electronic Ear, we make constant use of filtered music drawn from the works of Mozart, Vivaldi, and so on. By thus intervening on the sympathetic and para-sympathetic systems, we obtain a regulation of the psycho-sensory and psycho-motor functions. A great number of maladjusted children have been treated successfully. Tempo-spatial disorders, character disorders, instability, aggressiveness and anxiety disappear under the effect of this sonic training.

VII. — Revival of the intra-uterine relation

But before realising this education by music, we most often proceed to the revival of the first relation, that of before birth, by making the child hear his mother’s voice as he heard it when he was a foetus. This intra-uterine listening, born of a communication from container to content, from flesh to flesh, from human field to human field, is no doubt the prime and essential motor of subsequent linguistic evolution. It appears, in the light of the results obtained in recent years, that there is no true language if this first support is not constituted.

The uterus, the essential universe of the embryo and then of the foetus, is the receptacle of the surrounding noises that will reflect the whole of the mother’s organic, visceral and emotive life. Everything translates sonically the life transmitted through the liquid layers to the foetus, a potential human being. Besides the unusual noises of digestive disorders, the cadenced rhythms of the cardiac tick-tock, the flux and reflux of the breathing, the modulations of the mother’s voice are manifest. By thus finding again his first envelope, his primordial life, the child begins anew, from this initial relation, his progress toward his human destiny, through a well-structured language.

When the child has left his uterine life, when he has relived his birth through a sonic birth that modifies the acoustic impedance and causes the child to pass from an aquatic to an aerial audition, we then begin the preparation for language by impressing the neurons with musical modulations and children’s songs.

VIII. — “Man sang before he spoke”

I do not know who said so aptly: “Man sang before he spoke”. The child knows this intermediate process admirably and feels, in the depths of himself, this necessity to sing before broaching the language of grown-ups. Freed from his uterine life, born into the world of communication, he accepts with ineffable joy children’s songs, lullabies and nursery rhymes.

That is why it seems to me absolutely indispensable to reintegrate into pedagogy, in particular at the level of the kindergarten, of nursery school and of primary teaching, an intensive programme calling on music and singing.

The child should learn to read, to write, to approach a foreign language by singing. It is the best means, it seems to me, of preparing the neuronic circuits to receive language and, through it, knowledge.

IX. — Conclusion

Much, of course, remains to be done in this field, and research remains broadly open. It must, in my view, draw inspiration from the great laws of the universe to which we belong. Need it be recalled that the Ancients, and in particular the Egyptians, were so adapted, so attuned — at least the initiated — to the harmony of the universe that all their gestures and all their postures were its essential translation?

Music and the human body must remain in perpetual harmony, so that the body of man may become a perfect instrument of thought through language.

Pierrelatte

Source: Tomatis A., “La Musique et l’enfant”, communication at the 1st Regional Music Symposium, Pierrelatte, 11-14 May 1972, presentation by M^me Marie-Louise Aucher. Offprint of 12 pages (pagination 266-277). Document digitised from the personal archives of Alfred Tomatis.