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New theories on auditory physiology — Application of the Electronic Ear

Lecture given by Professor Alfred A. Tomatis at the 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology held in Paris in 1972. Over nineteen pages, the author traces in the first person the genesis of the Electronic Ear (born twenty-five years earlier, in 1947, at the Aeronautics Arsenals), revisits the major stages of the discovery (first singer-patient diagnosed by Froeschels, parallelism between the occupational deafness of singers and that of workers exposed to noise, spectrographic analysis of Caruso’s voice from four thousand photos, Pavlovian conditioning by electronic gating, treatment of stammering by lateralisation, discovery of ethnic ears through Venetian singers), and then sets out a new theory of auditory physiology that breaks with Helmholtz and Békésy: sound does not pass through the ossicular chain but through the bone of the sulcus tympani towards the labyrinthine vesicle. The text concludes on the notion of audiogyry (specifically human, as opposed to animal opto-oculo-cephalogyry) and on a psycho-linguistic reflection on the stages of the child’s language.

Lecture by Professor Alfred A. TOMATIS
2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology
PARIS — 1972

New theories on auditory physiology — Application of the Electronic Ear

I. — Birth of the Electronic Ear at the Aeronautics Arsenals

The Electronic Ear was born twenty-five years ago, of a chance event it seems — in so far as chance can exist in research. For the electronics engineers in the room, I shall recall that twenty-five years ago electronics was a science in an embryonic state. Personally, taking an interest in the phonation of singers, I was above all preoccupied at the time with knowing why one individual could sing rather than another. I then directed the acoustic physiology laboratory of the Aeronautics Arsenals, where I had the mission of detecting whether noises caused, as the Americans claimed, damage to hearing. I had thus been charged with studying whether the workers who worked on the test benches were really entitled to compensation, which of course posed a social problem of great importance.

You all know today that a subject plunged into noise loses his listening and that he loses it in an extremely painful way, since at a given moment he still hears but no longer understands anything. He then lives in a distorted, frightening sonic universe. However, this was not obvious twenty-five years ago, and to speak of audiometry at the time appeared rather unusual. The audiometer is a French device that was developed in 1933 by the research group of the C.N.E.T., in the form of a very voluminous and practically unusable complex. The Americans took up these works during the last war in a very well-grounded way, in order to be able to systematically detect the damage suffered by those who drove noisy engines such as aeroplanes, and so on. My mission at the Aeronautics Arsenals therefore consisted in investigating whether the people working on the fixed-point test benches suffered auditory traumas. I had an audiometer brought from the United States and I began, in a cellar, in a coal bunker, to examine in series the hearing of the Arsenal employees.

What interested me particularly to study at the time was the parallelism between the auditory damage observed on the one hand in singers, with whom I was confronted by reason of my specialism as an O.R.L. and phoniatrician, and that observed on the other in the Arsenal workers who worked in noise. There seemed at first sight to be no relation between the two phenomena. However, the problems singers posed me were such that I one day set out to examine the audition of one of them, who had a voice of exceptional quality but sang out of tune. He knew it; he was aware of it; he had done everything to try to correct this defect but had never succeeded. I in turn tried everything to make him sing in tune, all the more so as he came to see me equipped with a diagnosis of great value established by Froeschels, eminent ENT physician of world reputation, phoniatrician at the Vienna Opera.

Having in hand the diagnosis given by Froeschels of a laryngeal dystonia, I hastened to think too of a laryngeal dystonia, that is to say of the presence of poorly tensed cords. It was logical to suppose that this singer’s cords were slack since he could not sing in tune; do the slack strings of a violin not produce false sounds? Strong in this hypothesis and in the therapeutic theories my masters at the Faculty had taught me, I began to tighten the cords by inflicting on the poor man quantities of products intended to tone the larynx. There were then few medications likely to produce this effect. Some contained male hormones; others were strychnine-based. I administered to my patient such doses of strychnine that one fine day he choked on stage. He had tightened, he had “cravatted”, as singers say, but he had nonetheless sung out of tune. So that I concluded that the fact of pulling on a string was not sufficient to make him sing in tune.

By contrast, in carrying out an audition examination on this same singer, I observed that he presented an occupational deafness similar to that I had detected in individuals subjected to the noise of reactors. There existed then a kind of parallelism between these two kinds of audition. I then wondered whether a singer, through dint of singing and emitting intense sounds, did not end up “breaking” his ear. Such was the starting hypothesis.

Another piece of research was to be undertaken in a somewhat different perspective: that of detecting, in an objective way, the sonic traumas caused by noise. I had indeed noticed that some people who worked in the arsenals had an interest in making me believe they were affected by deafness in order to receive a pension, and that, by contrast, some others (such as the flying personnel) cared to safeguard their auditory reputation to continue benefiting from the material advantages their activities provided. By dint of carrying out audiometries in series, I had realised that fluctuations existed in this listening, of the order of a few decibels and sometimes of some 20 decibels, which is already more important if one takes account of the fact that the decibel evolves in logarithmic progression. There was therefore, without any doubt, a hiatus between the operator I was and the subject I was examining. Was there really cheating on the part of these different people? I believed so for a long time, but I realised over time that the psyche intervened very intensely unbeknownst to the individual himself. I came to understand that a flying-personnel who received a very high salary when he piloted his aeroplane and who risked receiving a much smaller sum if he stayed on the ground might unconsciously increase his auditory perception by a few decibels. By contrast, as soon as the Arsenal subjects (although reticent at the start of the investigations) realised that they might receive a pension one day, they were seen to make enormous efforts to hear nothing more.

I was thus led to design machines making it possible to determine objectively the listening power of each individual. This was the principal aim of my research for several years. I must say that the work undertaken in the field of singing helped me much to bring these various studies to completion. In the desire to be very objective in phoniatrics, I had indeed turned to physiological research bearing on the sung voice. I should also specify that, having lived in the lyric theatre milieu (my father having sung over forty years at the Opera), I was imbued with certain notions of singing, but these remained however very subjective; that is why I was wondering at the time (twenty-five years ago) whether it was possible to put these voices objectively and scientifically on cathode-ray tubes. The analysis devices necessary for these studies, today common currency, were at that moment still very rare. The first analyser I built presented itself in the form of a veritable monument, which nonetheless enabled me to obtain on a cathode-ray tube the characteristics of a good voice and those of a bad voice. A well-placed voice indeed presents a spectrum different from that of a voice that is not.

II. — “One only reproduces what one hears”: the first hypothesis

A second fact seemed very interesting to me to note. It was the following: each time the subject presented a scotoma, that is to say a hole, at the level of certain frequencies of his audition, the same scotoma was found at the same frequencies in the vocal spectrum. It was then that I thought and expressed in a somewhat lapidary way — I confess — that “one could only reproduce what one heard”. It was no doubt somewhat bold, but I must say that since then I have not had to come back on this fact. It is certain that, from time to time, a harmonic sheaf may emerge here and there, but as a general rule nothing happens in the spectrum at the level where there is auditory deficiency.

Always thinking of the Arsenal personnel whom I had in charge on the O.R.L. plane, I was led to ask myself the following question: “Since a subject reproduces only what he hears, is it possible, by acting on his audition through a system of filters, to obtain modifications of his phonation and his self-listening?” The problem seemed complex to resolve. Indeed, twenty-five years ago, Wiener’s work scarcely existed, and the notion of cybernetics, of counter-reaction, was totally unknown. Addressing then a group of electronics engineers at the Philips Company, I told them that I wanted filters built with a view to acting on audition. They were dumbfounded by this proposition and hastened to tell me it was impossible. I went on, not wishing to abandon this project. I obstinately pursued this direction and built the set-ups myself. I then observed that, each time, in the auditory spectrum of an individual, I cut the high frequencies above 2,000 Hz, there was a destructuring of the voice; it became much whiter; it lost its timbre. Moreover, something happened that made the subject more fatigable. I realised later that it was not the cut that seemed to play but rather the slope imposed by the filter system.

III. — Caruso, Gigli and the vocal envelope curve

I then thought immediately of studying the inverse phenomenon — that is, of seeking the audition of a subject from his voice. I asked laboratories to obtain matrices of great voices for me. It was thus that, from the discs of Caruso which had however been recorded under very precarious conditions from 1898 to 1919 (that is to say at the heroic period of the gramophone), I was able to make 4,000 photos of this great singer’s voice. It was thus possible for me to fix on film all the sustained notes I had been able to obtain with the help of a panoramic analyser. I realised at once that there existed an overall curve, an envelope curve made from the optimum points appearing on the cathode-ray tube. Now these curves began to vary in Caruso, in a very perceptible way, from 1901-1902, so that I could follow very exactly the evolution of his way of hearing.

For the technicians and specialists in the room, I should like to specify a remarkable fact in Caruso: it is the proportion that exists between the fundamental sounds of his voice and the harmonic sheaves. Even through recordings of poor quality, I was able to remark in Caruso’s voice a harmonic sheaf 7 to 14 times greater than the fundamental sound. This is truly colossal, exceptional moreover. Indeed, despite the progress made since then in the field of recording, I have never encountered voices with such a quantity of harmonic sheaves. Another element to note is the degradation of 1909 and especially of 1914, with scotoma, translating in sum the difficulty he must have encountered at the end of his life in hearing and self-listening.

Before continuing, I should like to give some clarification about what one understands by “scotoma”. In a subject plunged into noise for a long time, there exists a so-called pathognomonic — that is, specific — lesion. It is one of the rare signs in medicine that is specific, and this trauma generally appears at the frequency 4,000 Hz. It is exceptional that it occurs at 2,000 Hz, still more exceptional at 6,000 Hz; but at 4,000 Hz a break is produced, a kind of V-shaped fault that will widen and end up hampering the subject in his auditory discrimination. At the start, this scotoma at 4,000 Hz may not be perceived by the subject, for it is not necessary to hear at this level to understand a conversation. But when the lesion extends, when the fault widens and reaches the zone of 2,000 Hz or below, intelligibility is perturbed and the subject begins to understand speech poorly. The timbre of his voice alters as soon as there is a drop at 2,000 Hz; then if one reaches 1,500 Hz, an impossibility of re-establishing the accuracy of the sound is observed.

I had the good fortune to examine very great singers on the audio-vocal plane, in particular Beniamino Gigli, in whom I had traced in the laboratory the hypothetical auditory curve from the discs in my possession and in terms of the harmonic sheaf he emitted. Three years later, the chance was given me, on examining him, to find again the curve I had traced experimentally. I was then able to extend these hypotheses into the field of instrumental music. I thought, indeed, that the playing of a musician might translate his listening posture. Having worked in particular with great virtuoso violinists, I was able to observe a superimposition of the curve of their hearing and that of the sounds they emitted with their Stradivarius. In other words, there seemed to exist in both fields a phenomenon of preparation for listening that conditioned vocal or musical expression.

A detail I should like to point out to those who deal with electronics concerns the effect of counter-reaction: it is practically instantaneous, provided that certain rules are observed — that one notably distribute a certain intensity at the level of the message, and that one deploy a certain energy in the microphone. This experiment is easy to carry out in the laboratory and enables one to discover new horizons, the principal element of observation being the differentiation that exists between the two ears. Indeed, the right ear and the left ear are not two similar sensors and give wholly different counter-reactions. This experiment also makes it possible to observe that, as soon as one stops the counter-reaction, the initial phenomena reappear.

IV. — From Caruso’s voice to Carusian counter-reaction

I was telling you just now that there were criteria of good and poor voice quality. Now, a well-placed voice always presents characteristics that bring into play a very marked difference between the laryngeal contribution (which must be minimal) and the resonance phenomenon (which must be very important). These characteristics correspond of course to a way of hearing, to a listening posture. So that I thought that, in offering electronically to a subject the way of hearing of a great singer (that is to say presenting the characteristics I have just described), I gave him at the same time, by counter-reaction, the possibility of emitting sounds of the same quality. The phenomenon is instantaneous. If you give someone the Carusian-type listening curve, you see the individual transform immediately. A general euphoria appears; the subject takes another posture, he stands straight, he breathes widely; his face changes.

I contented myself for a long time with gathering experimental elements, with each time however the disillusion of seeing the counter-reaction vanish from the moment I removed the device. I could not, however, decently leave permanently a headphone on a subject’s head, a microphone and an electronic complex in front of him, on the pretext of pursuing this research. That is why I wondered whether I could not condition the subject and maintain this kind of influx the device seemed to provide him. For a long time, I forced myself to use two machines, one capable of recreating the subject’s usual audition, the other intended to reproduce the listening posture one wished to attain. I had at my disposal two devices, two microphones and a single pair of headphones, of course. As soon as the subject began to speak or sing, I inverted the listening with the help of a switch that closed one channel and opened the other. This system was rather tedious, since it required the presence of a person beside the subject to be conditioned, the latter being unable to synchronise the whole.

V. — Gating and Pavlovian conditioning

We thus ran up against this major drawback until the day when gating appeared in the field of electronics. Gating circuits are relays that allow one to pass from one channel to another without difficulty. The difficulty existed however at the start, for it was necessary to pass from one channel to the other without any jolt for the subject, without his noticing anything. In other words, so that there should be no shock, no rupture, the very precise message that was sent had to modify itself in structure but had to preserve the same energy. That was the technical difficulty to overcome. The problem was resolved by specialists very competent in the matter, who did not seek to know what was happening on the physiological plane and who carried out very exactly what I asked of them.

We obtained immediately the setting in place of a Pavlovian conditioning of the first order. When the subject began to enter into phonation, the sonic energy passed through the gating into the upper channel, and the subject then instantaneously felt different auditory impressions through the modification of the acoustic supply. At the beginning of the experimentation, I did not try so hard to know why the remanent factor installed itself, nor why some people began to sing or speak correctly after a certain number of sessions under the device. The neuro-physiological explanation was moreover difficult to give at the time, and it was only much later that I was able to put forward the basic hypotheses.

By working on the voices of several actors, I then succeeded, by acting on the right and left control circuits, in bringing to light certain parameters concerning the mechanisms of the spoken voice. And it is thus that, thanks to work in collaboration with a great actor, I was able to open up to disorders of rhythm of the stammering type. Accepting certain experimental approaches, this actor began to stammer when I put his left ear into circuit. So that I wondered whether stammerers did not precisely have problems of auditory lateralisation.

VI. — Stammering and auditory lateralisation

What exactly was stammering? I did not really know, nor did anyone else at the time. I began by exciting in a certain way one ear and the other, and I obtained spectacular results under the machine. Indeed, from the moment one creates a “feed-back” on the right, the subject begins to speak normally. When the experiment is done with the left ear, the rhythm slows and stammering appears. I thought I had found the great means to free all the stammerers in the world. Fortunately, I subsequently encountered resistant stammerers; I knew failures that enabled me to be less triumphant and to pursue research in a more intensive way.

On the other hand, along the way, I had to deal with other aspects of research, in particular certain phonetic problems posed to me by Venetian singers, who came to see me not because they sang badly but because they had a few pronunciation disorders: they could not pronounce the “rrr” of the tip of the tongue; indeed, the Venetian says “LLL”. To replace an “LLL” with an “rrr” constituted a feat in the field of singing. Knowing nothing at that time in phonetics or linguistics, but having in hand the famous machine, I placed these singers under the device and, placing myself before them, pronounced an “rrr” of the tip of the tongue. They answered me “rrr”, so that I thought they could previously not emit the “rrr” only because they did not hear it. By imposing on them the Carusian ear, which seemed to me at the time to be the most extraordinary ear, I transmitted to them Neapolitan listening. It was then that I wondered whether ethnic ears did not exist, specific auditions for each language. Since there was a Neapolitan listening, why should there not be a French listening, an English listening, and so on? And so I opened up to the case of children in difficulty with linguistic learning, in particular at the level of the acquisition of the English language, which is one of the principal living languages taught in the lycées of France and the whole world. Why then did some children, who otherwise followed good schooling, have poor marks in English? They had not become suddenly stupid in respect of one subject. They were simply deaf to English.

VII. — Ethnic ears and the learning of languages

I therefore set out in search of the English ear. Going through on cathode-ray tubes numerous sonic documents, I succeeded in determining the passbands of the English language and the specific curve of this linguality. To speak of “passbands” in acoustics and linguistics was at the time a veritable heresy. I really had the impression of preaching in the desert and of evoking totally unknown notions. I made many people smile; perhaps they still smile. Nonetheless, the notion of “passbands” in phonetic and linguistic matters is today admitted.

When you put a child into a determined ethnic audition, you see immediately his whole phonatory structure change, his whole bodily attitude modify itself. If the conditioning continues for several months, one may even speak of psycho-morphological modification. If, for example, one imposes on a Frenchman German audition, one sees the subject straighten up, become vertical, take the rigid posture of the German. If, by contrast, you give the English ear to a German and ask him to continue speaking German, he is incapable of it; he even stops speaking; he is obliged, to continue his sentence, to think it, to remove the headphones. I have done the same thing with the Chinese language, which is an intonational language: one creates an inhibition that suppresses even the faculty of thought.

Here, therefore, on the whole, is the experimental path that has led me to develop the techniques of audio-vocal education applied today in the centres equipped with Electronic Ears. It is certain that the neuro-physiological mechanisms brought into play are not all known, far from it. But should I have waited to know them all to continue my work and my therapeutic action? I do not think so. What mattered was to relieve all those who came to see us and to apply the already very satisfactory results obtained in the laboratory. When I noticed that the children I dealt with began to work better at school, that adults regained taste for life, that their general tone reappeared, and so on, I found myself before a dilemma. I had two options: either continue solely my medical and surgical profession of O.R.L. by putting research in a cupboard until the time of retirement, or pursue this research and begin to treat people with the help of the newly elaborated techniques.

VIII. — The failures of research, ferment of reconsideration

It is certain that the results have not all been positive. There have, of course, been failures. It is moreover the latter that have always been put forward, without ever evoking the hundreds and thousands of satisfactory results obtained with these techniques. I remain moreover convinced that it is the failures that make research advance. They are necessary. They energise, awaken criticism, increase discernment, refine judgement. They make it possible to specify the thought on certain data and avoid making it believed that one has discovered everything. Moreover, one discovers only what exists. Everything has been said long ago. There are no geniuses. There are simply a few nervous systems more sensitive than others for transmitting the realities of this world. That is why failure recalls that humility must remain the essential quality of the researcher. The drama, as Valéry humorously said, would be to have no opponents. Their criticisms remain the ferment of all reconsideration, which it is indispensable to perform permanently to avoid all fixity in research. Failures have personally served me a great deal. They have obliged me to push much further my investigations on the ear, on human listening. And it is precisely the results of these investigations that I should like to evoke today on the plane of the neuro-psycho-physiology of the human ear.

It is plain that auditory physiology has much evolved in recent years. It was long thought that the ear was designed to make otitis; then research began to lean on the problem of deafness and what happened in an ear. Under the impulse of Von Békésy, new theories were born, more or less seductive, some highly elaborate and well experimentally grounded. Others, to be sure, are far from satisfactory, and if one is to believe this psycho-physiologist, one finds oneself necessarily in an impasse as to the explanation of the results obtained by the new techniques developed from the experimentation whose history I have just traced for you.

IX. — Taking up the whole of auditory physiology: beyond Helmholtz and Békésy

I myself was for a long time in an impasse, since what I was obtaining under Electronic Ear corresponded in no way to the theories advanced by my colleagues and their predecessors. People often spoke of miracles or of charlatanism because no one had been able to give logical, rational explanations for the observed phenomena. I often remained perplexed before the spectacular reactions of certain patients, before the progress children and adults made from certain auditory stimulations, before the recoveries nothing seemed to justify. Should I have continued without ever being able to explain what was happening? At the beginning of the adventure, I contented myself with recording the results and publishing them from 1951 onwards. But, remaining alone in following this research that no physiological theory could support, I came to wonder, at a given moment, whether I was really on the right track. I even ended up locking the devices in a cupboard and taking up again the traditional techniques supported by the fashionable theories. However, in face of the mediocre results obtained with these techniques compared with those I obtained under the machine, in face of the incompatibility that existed between the progress achieved and the physiological systems brought into play, I decided to take up again the whole study of the functioning of the ear.

I had long thought that human audition did not at all respond to the mechanisms that had until then been evoked, and I remained dissatisfied with the inconsistent explanations regularly given to me when I tried to go further in research. And that is why I took up again entirely the study of auditory physiology. I do not, to be sure, claim to have found everything. I bring you today the fruit of my reflections and my experiences, but I invite you to pursue them and to complete these data. There will never be enough heads to think on the ear and its primordial role in the humanisation of the being. We are at present attending to the first stammerings of this research on auditory psycho-physiology, and I remain convinced that this field remains entirely to be explored, despite the few incursions I have had the opportunity of making in it.

You know that the one who was the giant and who has no doubt induced the whole of research in auditory physiology is Helmholtz. Thinker and physicist of the last century, Helmholtz said that sound passed in the ear through the eardrum, crossed the ossicular chain to direct itself one knows not too well how towards the inner ear; he evoked mechanisms similar to the resonators of which he himself was the promoter. Since then, given the notoriety of Helmholtz, everyone has been at pains to wish to prove what he had advanced, thinking he had told the truth, the whole truth. There exist however incompatibilities that risk hampering research and contradicting the functioning of the inner ear.

As for Békésy, one realises how hampered he is by the presence of certain phenomena he cannot explain. He notably recounts in his book Mechanisms of Hearing how much electronics has caused research as a whole to advance by enabling the construction of analogue systems, but he specifies that he was never able to apply them completely to auditory physiology.

Is there really a possibility of equivalence? I think so, given that the ear, in its functioning, does not respond to what one usually believes it to be. That is the reason why one has not been able up to now to build true simulation systems. If the ear functioned as the current theories indicate, numerous mechanical phenomena would remain unexplained. Take for example one of them, which has a certain importance: for a sound of great intensity (a 100 dB sound, which is already not bad) the amplitude of vibration at the level of the eardrum is of the order of the size of a hydrogen molecule, that is to say infinitesimal. Now, for the sound to pass, as Helmholtz would wish and as Békésy thinks, along the ossicular chain, the latter would have to be of such tension that there would be no laxity between the ossicles. This is true for the first two, the hammer and the anvil, but not between the anvil and the stirrup, for an enormous hiatus exists. This hiatus is considerable on the atomic scale, since it is of the order of one millimetre.

I have often spoken of this problem with the physicists of the C.N.E.T., of which I am a member, and with those of the École Supérieure des Télécommunications, where I teach. They all run up against the impossibility of explaining a passage without distortion. Some anatomists, notably Fumagali, who have studied particularly what relates to the eardrum and to the ligaments of junction of the ossicles, have replied that this distance between the anvil and the stirrup had no importance, that the low sounds passed without inconvenience across the inter-ossicular space, and that probably the high sounds passed through the ligaments themselves. Of course one may think that it passes everywhere; it is a question of faith; nonetheless, on the plane of pure physics, this is an extremely hampering, inexplicable phenomenon.

X. — The ear is not made for hearing

Another inexplicable phenomenon that one has not yet succeeded in elucidating is that of bone conduction. What is bone conduction? One does not really know. It is measured with vibrators that are more or less well calibrated; only now is the utility of very sensitive and very faithful devices beginning to be glimpsed. Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that tonal audiometry brings into play pure tones that do not exist in nature. We are therefore walking in an extremely complex and delicate domain, so that all hypotheses may be admitted, since one does not yet know how the ear functions. To be reassured, one affirms that the ear is a kind of microphone and that, by reason of this, when one sends a tone into the subject’s ear under examination, one finds on the other side an electrical impulse that one records on learned graphs.

But the ear does not function at all like that. The ear has a psyche; integration is done by the brain, and the subject hears only what he wishes to hear. We spoke at length yesterday and this morning of autism. We all know here that when an autistic decides not to hear, it is impossible to make him react to any noise, to any sound intensity. Even with a 75 cannon next to him, he does not move. The problem of human listening is therefore entirely to be reconsidered. Moreover, for those who use audio-psycho-phonological techniques, it is usual to observe how an ear is modified audiometrically, how the curves are transformed.

1. — The vestibular function: balance and verticality

How then does the ear work? I believe we find ourselves in an impasse because we essentially attribute to the ear the auditory function. Now, the ear is not made to hear. This is very difficult to have admitted. Yet in another domain, very close to that of audition, the domain of phoniatrics, it is classical to say that the larynx is not made to speak, that there is no specific organ of phonation, that it is a question of a secondary adaptation. It is true that it is a secondary adaptation, since the larynx is made not to swallow the wrong way, the tongue to swallow, the jaw to chew, the lips to grasp, the lung to breathe; and yet we are able to subject this whole set to the function of communication, even to the gesture of speech (speech being the gesture in itself). For the ear, it is the same. It is a question of secondary adaptation.

I should like you to have permanently in mind the idea that the ear is not made to hear. The ear has two other functions that we have forgotten and that we easily find again in all phylogenesis and ontogenesis. These two functions have unfortunately been separated from each other because one has always wished to consider two distinct branches in the auditory nerve: one corresponding to the vestibular function, the other answering to the cochlear function. They are both primitive and primordial. In reality, it is our psyche that has had them suppressed from our memory.

We shall therefore broach successively the vestibular side and the cochlear side of the ear. The latter has as its first function the assurance of the being’s balance. It is plain. We all know it, but the difficulty comes from the fact that we have taken this device of balance to make of it the tool of verticality. There is here an enormous problem, for we are not yet ready to broach the vertical position; we are only on the way. For those who here deal with psycho-motricity, the occasion is certainly given them often to observe how difficult it is for an individual to stand straight, to see phenomena of laterality, of expansion, of opening, of enlargement of the being engage in him to the point of obtaining the verticality of the spinal column. The spinal column is not made to be upright. We know the troubles this approach to the rectitude of the column entails. The heart is insufficient, by its cardiac pump, to supply the brain, and it suffices to observe how many discomforts disappear in the lying position. The lung is not made to breathe standing.

Look how many beings are stooped, incapable of opening their thoracic cage in the standing position, whereas they would breathe so much better on all fours. The digestive tube too suffers from this verticality; it is a siphon that fills and empties in the horizontal position; but from the moment man stands up, stagnations in the tubes are created and provoke fermentations. Digestive troubles then begin, playing a considerable role in general pathology. Lastly, we must confess that we are not quite ready to have a perfectly straight column, to broach verticality easily — a factor of humanisation. The whole struggle of life (symbolically represented in the Bible by the struggle of Jacob) consists precisely in the straightening of this column, with the correct placing of the pelvis. This is a very important problem well known to all those who deal with physiotherapy.

2. — The cochlear function: cortical recharge

This vestibular function of the ear takes on indeed a considerable importance on the neurological plane, given that the vestibular nerve is found at every level of the column. It touches all the anterior roots of the spinal cord and has thus the mission of controlling, via the labyrinth, the whole individual. There exists moreover a certain connection between the two branches of the auditory nerve, the vestibular branch and the cochlear branch — that is to say, between the balance, verticality side and the perception, listening side. For those used to dealing with children who do not speak (and so cannot come into listening), it is easy to observe how much these children find it difficult to stand straight. They are often stooped; their shoulders droop; they walk on their heels; they are without doubt closer to the anthropoid than to the fulfilled man. Now, from the moment they are put under Electronic Ear to engage language, they are seen first to straighten up, to take a straight posture, to stand vertically. Something therefore happens.

It must not be forgotten that, all the anterior roots of the spinal cord benefiting from an intervention of the auditory nerve through its vestibular branch, no posture, in the gestural domain, escapes the control of this nerve. One thus better understands the contribution of sound on the plane of motricity and bodily plasticity. The auditory nerve thus plays an important role in the structuring of the body image. This rejoins the fact that, when one modifies the audition and consequently the phonation of an individual through the Electronic Ear, one modifies at the same time his whole motricity and his whole posture. In the audio-vocal phenomenon, the whole body is therefore involved. There is immediate correlation between the sound emitted and the body image in totality.

Let us now broach the second branch of the auditory nerve, the cochlear branch. The cochlear nerve is made to hear. That is at least what we are taught. I do not think so for my part. At the start, it is intended to recharge the brain in electrical potential. This is a hypothesis I had put forward fifteen years ago, realising that there existed modifications of the electroencephalogram when one sent auditory impulses to the temporal area. Moreover, the fact that all people became euphoric when they began to hear in the zone of high frequencies made me think that there was here an energising effect of the sheaf of highs. Indeed, 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 part. Now, the distribution of the cells of Corti on the basilar membrane is not realised in homogeneous fashion: rare in the zone of low sounds, the cells become very numerous in the zone of the highs. That is why low sounds carry the body along without recharging it, while high sounds energise it while supplying it with energy.

Furthermore, the toning of the voice by audio-vocal counter-reaction made me think of an auto-engaging phenomenon by which the individual recharges himself through his own voice as soon as the latter is rich in harmonic sheaves. This phenomenon is very perceptible in singers. One indeed easily observes that tenors or baritones (whose register calls on a high harmonic sheaf) demonstrate a colossal energy, while basses (sensitive to the lows) are often depressive.

3. — The muscles of the middle ear, adaptors of impedance

I myself made electroencephalograms by proceeding as follows: I put water in a subject’s ears, I placed two earplugs so that the water did not escape and, in the two hours that followed, I performed the encephalographic examination. The diagram obtained was then flat, marking an inexistence of cortical charge. This experiment is moreover easy to realise in the laboratory, and you can all try it. I did not in truth go as far as the stage of Stanley Jones. He recently made studies in this domain but seems to have been more wicked than I: indeed rather than isolating the subjects with their two ears and a few earplugs, he plunged them in water in totality and at the same temperature as the body so that there would be no thermal exchange; better still, he placed them in a state of weightlessness with sufficient water and placed a tube on them to let them breathe; then he blindfolded their eyes to block all their sensoriality, then he left them simmering and observed what happened. He too observed a flattening of the encephalographic curve, but the drawback of the experimentation conducted by Stanley Jones lay in the fact that the individuals who lent themselves to these trials (and who were members of his laboratory) all ended up schizophrenic in a psychiatric hospital, through stoppage of cerebral charge. Stanley Jones could not catch them up again. I think it is really a pity that he was not informed of our techniques of cortical recharge by sound through the Electronic Ear. I believe it would have been possible to reactivate the cortex by lighting up the cortical part with the help of filtered sounds.

Stanley Jones specifies indeed that for a brain to function, for it to always have its tone, it is necessary for it to receive 3 billion items of information per second, four and a half hours per day. I told you yesterday that much of the being’s energy is suppressed by suppressing the ear. I should like to add that much is also eliminated by suppressing the skin. We shall see later the intimate relations that exist between the ear and the skin. Whatever it may be, experiments have revealed that when one eliminates a subject’s audition, one manages to suppress between 60 and 90% of cortical stimulation. This well proves that the ear is not a device having as its only function listening, and that it is also an organ of cortical recharge. That is why one can energise the being with the help of sounds.

These sounds, what are they? For a long time I wondered whether there were charging sounds and discharging sounds. Now I am sure they exist. Why are they charging or why are they discharging? Well, quite simply because some sounds will charge the cortex and allow it a hyper-activation, while some others, on the contrary, will discharge the being of all his vitality. We shall see in a moment what these different sounds may be, but in the meantime, it is good to remember that we have a psyche that is at pains to divert the true human functions. I told you this morning that man’s misfortune is that he is intelligent. Even before he can exploit his bodily machine and normally integrate his lived experience, he begins to build a language for the purposes of communication. To do this, he uses his ear and, most often, blocks his auditory function in a refusal to communicate that at the same time deprives the being of the possibility of recharging his brain in electrical potential.

We shall now broach a few notions of physiology and embryology. I recall to you that the ear has three ossicles and two small muscles of which we rarely speak. Perhaps we speak of them more now but, twenty-five years ago, it seemed heretical to evoke such observations. These muscles were not placed there for nothing. They are accommodation muscles the human being will be able to use to come into communication with the outside world, to dialogue with the other. They are muscles that allow the ear not to be, as is ordinarily thought, a transmitter of sounds by the ossicular chain, but an adaptor of impedance. We shall have to come back in a moment to this very important problem.

XI. — Phylogenesis of the ear: from the lateral line of the fish to the human ear

In the meantime, I should like to speak briefly to you of the foetal ear. We now know that the foetus hears in utero. From the fourth and a half month of pregnancy, information passes, but the ear is finished well before. It is situated at the most archaic level of the being, at the level of the bulb; the bulbar ear is indeed the most archaic apparatus at our disposal; then olfaction is built, then vision and, finally, on the cortex or the neo-cortex, audition appears again. In other words, the auditory nerve has this characteristic: it is the most archaic but also the most recent of our sensory apparatuses. There exist therefore two polarities that seem to me important to indicate.

On the phylogenetic plane, remember that, in lower fish, there exists on each side of their flanks a “lateral line” which is none other than a tube. It is located where the scales seem to join. By injecting fluid into this tube from front to back, one observes a beating of the fins in a certain direction, at a speed more or less great according to the speed of flow of the fluid. If, on the contrary, one injects the fluid from back to front, one attends to the same phenomenon but in the opposite direction. If one stops the jet, the fins stop. Now, it has been proved, notably by modern cyberneticians, that this lateral line was a stimulation apparatus intended to recharge the cortical embryo of this fish, through a hyper-excitation of the cells found inside this lateral tube.

In the higher fish, this apparatus disappears to transform itself, in the cephalic part of the animal, into a new apparatus called the “otolith”. The latter is a small vesicle furnished with hair cells and in which there sits a small stone (which earns it its name). Thanks to the animal’s movements and to the force of gravity, this apparatus will recharge the cortex (already more elaborated) and thereby provide the fins with their activity. In other words, the more there is movement, the more there is cortical charge. It is the setting in motion of a whole system of very important counter-reactions on the plane of the efficacy of life.

This apparatus is precisely the one that will give the ear. But it is not at once that the human ear will be reached. Many passages will have to be crossed, many intermediaries will have to be envisaged, some of which will prove ineffective — in particular in certain reptiles. The prehistoric animals, and notably the dinosaurs, had as their characteristic the fact that their ear was soldered to the spinal column. The great mammals of this era used their whole column as a sensory apparatus of listening and recharging, which realised veritable canopies enabling them to receive information.

For other species, such as reptiles, one observes that the ear has worked around it. To be able to hear on coming out of the water, the reptile (as moreover the foetus that is going to come out of his mother’s belly) has had to face up to processes of adaptation. We then find ourselves in the presence of an important line of reptiles hearing by acoustic pressure of all their limbs, hence by bone conduction, as in prehistoric animals. The famous vesicle that will constitute the ear will benefit later, in other species, from a soldering with the shoulder-blade. Then, at a more advanced evolutional stage, in a more elaborate line (that of serpents and a few birds), a junction will be made between this vesicle and the hyoid bone; for other animals, the junction will be made with the bone of the skull.

All these systems present a drawback: whereas man has arrived at a stage allowing him always to hear, the animal has “fadings”. The bird, for instance, which has its ossicular system soldered into a single bone, the columella, no longer hears anything as soon as it begins to sing; hunters know this very well — they always shoot first the bird perched on the branch that is not singing, then at leisure the singing bird that has heard nothing. The ruminant, when it ruminates, does not hear either what is happening outside, but it makes enough noise to hear itself. A phenomenon of adaptation will therefore install itself and progress, in proportion as one goes up the animal line; one thus sees a perfection of the ear come about, tending to eliminate this difficulty.

Mammals, for their part, have of course attained a higher adaptation, which approaches the rest of ours. Thus the monkeys possess a much more elaborate set as regards phonation; these animals, more evolved than us in this regard, have an apparatus that functions better than ours; they also possess a hearing that could function as well as ours… if they had thought. There then is the great difference on which I should not like to dwell today, not wishing to enter into considerations of a philosophical order. Let it be permitted me only to specify that it is not so much on the anatomical plane that we find ourselves again in this study, but on the plane of function and of the cortical impulse that determines this function. What therefore seems essential to retain here is the fact that, in man, no organ seems entitled to have any action whatever in phonation as in listening.

XII. — The mother-child relation and the maternal voice

After this phylogenetic aside, I should like to come back to the problem of the ear as a means of communication or non-communication with the other, through the lived experience of the first relation, the primordial relation, that with the mother. This desire to communicate with the mother is of course born in utero. The relation is set in place in a thousand ways, at the contact of the uterine membranes, through the amniotic fluid, through and especially the umbilical cord, an enormous pipeline that will bring the child what he needs — pre-digested nourishment, oxygen, hormones, and so on. It is interesting to note that, from the outset, the foetus answers this permanent gift by sending back wastes. Dialogue thus installs itself in a mode that will continue after birth but must not exceed a certain period of life so as not to fix the being in a state of infantile dependency.

This child-mother relation is very important, since it is to find it again that the ear will make a thousand efforts of adaptation after birth, with a view to reliving the sonic duo maintained during foetal life. At the moment when the child is brusquely (and often painfully) driven out of this reassuring shell that is the uterus, when he feels so disoriented before the immense and fearsome universe offered to him, he will try to find again his mother by every means and in particular by straining his ear towards the maternal voice.

Remember the sign reported by Thomas. André Thomas was a great physician, a disciple of Déjerine (himself a pupil of Broca), whom I had the good fortune to know because he lived to a great age; I was his pupil at the Hôpital Trousseau. Thomas would always show us, in examining a newborn, how tonic the latter was for a few days after birth and how he then fell into total passivity. This remark did not particularly astonish us, which moreover proved how ignorant we were. Another remark of Thomas’s, no less interesting, was that which has since been called “the sign of the first name”. This sign marks, in an astonishing way, the intimate, close relations that may exist between the mother and the child. It is studied from the 4th or 5th day and may not exceed the 10th day. You take a newborn, you sit him up (he indeed almost wants to stand up); he holds himself very well sitting, manifesting a great tonicity. If someone pronounces his first name, the child does not move. By contrast, if the mother calls him by his first name, the newborn always falls on the side of the mother’s voice. If she is placed behind him, he falls backwards; if she is placed on his left, he leans to the left, and so on. There seems therefore to be a call re-evoking a lived experience, a previous relation known before birth. I think moreover that this remarkable observation might as well be called “the sign of the voice”, for it is the voice the child finds again and not specifically his first name. This experimentation can be realised only up to the 10th day of the newborn’s life. Then everything fades. Why?

Starting therefore from the principle that the ear is the element that determines the dynamic of man, it seems indispensable to study the different stages through which the ear passes from intra-uterine life to the adult state. During the foetal period, the ear is wholly plunged in a fluid; it is then essentially an apparatus made to hear in a liquid medium. The three storeys — the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear — are plunged in the amniotic fluid. The transmission of sound will therefore take place entirely through layers of water. From birth, from entry into an essentially aerial medium, the ear will then have to adapt to this new acoustic environment. It will have to confront the same problems of adaptation as those the animal from the dawn of time tried to resolve, without however being able to do so as well as man, since not having at its disposal as elaborate an internal structure.

The ear is therefore full of fluid during its foetal life. At the moment of birth, it will partially empty itself of this fluid. Only the outer storey will fill with air. This is a detail often forgotten. The middle ear will, in fact, remain full of amniotic fluid during the first ten days of life; which means that so many otologists, surprised at a slightly bulging eardrum, think it is otitis. No, it is not otitis; it is simply amniotic fluid inside the middle ear. It must on no account be touched, for the sonic relation must be able to continue to be realised, during the few days that follow birth, in a still liquid mode recalling to the newborn his uterine lived experience. The rupture, the separation will thus be less brutal. Then, on the 10th day, the middle ear empties and the great dark hole appears. The child no longer hears; he loses his tonicity by the fact that the liquid sonic communication, rich in high frequencies, disappears. It will then take weeks and months for the newborn to adapt his ear to the impedances of the air with a view to finding again this maternal voice, which has cradled him during his foetal journey.

It seems good to insist on this occasion on the fact that, in language, it is not only the semantic side that has its importance. There is all the empathy that passes between two beings, under certain circumstances and in particular when it is a question of the mother-child relation. The child hears what his mother thinks; this must not be forgotten. The foetus is therefore already sensitised to the voice of his mother, of this voice he has heard, tasted, savoured during his foetal life. And if the mother loves her child, if she wishes to give him life, to make of him a human being, there will of necessity be communication and, later, language. In the contrary case, there will be a disorder of the relation. Remember this experiment carried out by the Nazis during the last war: wishing to produce supermen, they injected the sperm of the handsomest SS into the most beautiful girls they had found. The result was disastrous, since among the newborns 60% deaf-mute children were counted. I do not think these children were really deaf; they were simply deaf to communication by the fact that a law of love had not been able to be instituted during the pregnancy. This experimental insemination had indeed not been able to engage a true mother-child relation, the essential support of future language.

It would have been interesting to know whether these children were autistic or whether they had congenital malformations. I do not think one should retain this latter hypothesis. That of a refusal to listen, of a refusal to communicate seems more plausible to me. This experiment had been reported to me by a professor of the École Normale Supérieure whose listening I had re-educated. I tried to reach him later to obtain the references concerning this experiment, with a view to a more thorough study. Not being able to contact him again, I was about to abandon the research when one day I found myself face to face with the author of this account. He was a Lithuanian who had known this experiment and who, having been able to escape the Germans, had reported in a pathetic book what had happened.

There exists therefore a mother-child relation that is established from the first instants of conception, that will continue throughout the pregnancy and that the child will wish to find again from his birth. When he is born to the life of men, when he comes into the world after having left his uterine paradise, the newborn must be able to find his mother again immediately so that the separation is not lived in a dramatic mode. He must be able to touch her, palp her breast, hear her voice and drink it, as he touched it, heard it and drank it during his foetal life. And that is the reason why he will concentrate all his energy on adapting his audition, on preparing his ear for listening, and on making of it a sensor capable of detecting this voice he knew in a previous life and that alone counts for him.

XIII. — The barriers of sound: 5th, 7th and 10th cranial pairs

We can now broach a new function of the ear, a third function, that inherent in human listening. Here the psychological factor will intervene in a determining way, and according to whether the first relation has been accepted or rejected, the ear will know how to open or close itself to communication.

Let it be permitted me to recall that, before reaching the auditory nerve, sound is obliged to cross many barriers — barriers that strangely resemble those one encounters in the esoteric world. Some of them seem indeed difficult to cross; they correspond precisely to the barriers of existence each of us must confront to go towards true life.

When a sound reaches an individual, the whole thing is to know whether the latter wishes or does not wish to hear it, whether he wishes to welcome it or rather to reject it, whether he wants to prepare his body to receive it, prepare his facial mimicry with a view to listening to it, or whether on the contrary he refuses communication — whether he seeks to strain his ear or to relax it. There is here a “preparation” for listening, a posture of relation or non-relation that only the human being is capable of adopting, but of which he may then become prisoner.

I therefore recall to you that the innervation of the face is realised in the ear, at the level of the meatus, by two nerve branches:

  • 1° that of the posterior part directed towards the auricle and constituted by the facial nerve, that is to say the 7th cranial pair, which innervates all the muscles of the face except the levator of the eyelid;

  • 2° that of the anterior part, which is commanded by the 5th pair, which innervates at the same time the musculature of the jaw in the movement of opening and closing of the mouth.

In the auditory canal, one finds the same distribution: the posterior part depends on the reign of the 7th pair, while the anterior part depends on the reign of the 5th pair. Then one arrives at the eardrum, which is a very interesting place. Behind, the innervation answers to the facial but it especially brings into play another, very important nerve on which I have often insisted — and I apologise for it. It is the 10th pair or pneumogastric nerve or vagus nerve.

I ask those who practise the same profession as I to remember this well and to inscribe it in letters of gold, for I believe it is one of the essential keys of the whole. And for the analysts who seek solutions with a view to the liberation of the being, I advise them to recall that the eardrum is innervated by the pneumogastric nerve and that, consequently, all that will touch the eardrum — in particular the verb — will have interferences on the whole para-sympathetic system.

At the level of the eardrum, the pneumogastric has its only cutaneous emergence; this is then doubled at the inner part of the eardrum thanks to fixations of supply with the 9th pair, which innervates the Eustachian tube and the pharynx. The 10th pair also innervates certain muscles of the neck, thanks to its intimate collaboration with the spinal nerve, to the point that one may call it the pneumo-spinal or the vago-spinal; it is in reality the same nerve. The spinal innervates the lateral muscles of the neck; it is the one that will give, in the human animal, the look of a beaten dog, or that will verticalise the being by giving rise to the rectitude of the neck. Moreover, all those used to using our techniques know that a child who does not hear the highs is always stooped. He holds himself badly. It is no use telling him constantly “stand straight, stand straight”, for he cannot alone rectify his posture. But it suffices to make him hear the highs under Electronic Ear to see him straighten up immediately.

We then observe that the pneumogastric nerve, of which an emergence is at the level of the ear, also commands the pharynx, which is, let us not forget, the place where a part of anxiety is encountered (the words “angina” and “angor” may be easily related). One may observe moreover, in applying our techniques in a child who does not wish to enter into language, that he often somatises at the level of the throat by getting a sore throat. He resists the sessions by taking the microbe, the staphylococcus or other, as a means of escape. Many autistic or schizophrenic children often have a sore throat at the start of treatment. It must be known that this is a normal reaction.

The 10th pair also controls the larynx in its motor and sensory function. That is why it may “cut” off our speech or give it to us, transmit to us the sensation of a lump that rises and falls. The motor part of the larynx is under the dependence of a branch of the pneumogastric called the “recurrent” (because it goes backwards). The latter presents a particularity I ask you to consider, and which consists in a marked difference between the right recurrent and the left recurrent. The left passes under the subclavian and attacks the larynx by passing under the aorta — that is to say, taking a path 40 to 50 cm longer than the right circuit. This increase in path introduces a delay, for information on a nerve travels slowly; it does not travel at the speed of the electrical current; one may note an average of 20 m/s, 50 m/s at most for some nerves. There is therefore reason to note a much longer left path that introduces an asymmetry, the role of which is very important in the domain of laterality.

The pneumogastric also innervates the heart at the level of the coronaries and commands its irrigation. It is the one that will give palpitations, cardiac troubles even to infarction — that is, angina pectoris, angor pectoris. On the pulmonary plane, it innervates the bronchi and will provoke asthma, a true drowning, a true bronchial flooding recalling the aquatic respiration of the foetus.

The 10th pair therefore constitutes a very important neuronic set that commands many regions of the human body. Concerning the right branch and the left branch, three hypotheses may be evoked:

  • 1° the right nerve follows its path in the abdomen, in the intestine, in the whole lower part, in parallel with the left nerve;

  • 2° or else they pour into each other at the level of the solar plexus;

  • 3° or else — and I shall incline more towards this latter hypothesis, which seems to be currently that of neurologists, notably Delmas — the right pours into the left, the latter then becoming dominant from a certain point. It will then end in the gall bladder, innervating in passing the spleen, the pancreas, the two kidneys, the entire intestine (the small intestine and the large intestine), the rectum and, by anastomosis, the genital organs.

One thus sees that the pneumogastric innervates the whole inner being and holds a considerable role. To “make bile” is in fact to play badly of one’s pneumogastric. In other words, to become master of sound at the level of the tension of the eardrum is to become master of this nerve which the Ancients called, rightly, the Vagus — to evoke the “vague of the soul” it can so easily give rise to.

Here we are then before a complex set which, along the path the sound is to traverse, will bring into play the 5th pair, the 7th, the 10th, and, at the end of its course, if the door is willing to open, the 8th pair — that is to say, the auditory nerve. For this door to open, there must be complementary tensions, notably at the level of the eardrum. If the eardrum is little tensed, that is to say very mobile and very mobilisable, it is solely anxiety that will be expressed. In subjects who do not hear the highs, who refuse to hear, who refuse communication and who do not know how to analyse on the basilar membrane, the eardrum is not stretched. There is then too great a vibration that will set into resonance the whole path of the pneumogastric, and that will therefore give rise to tightenings at the level of the larynx, or palpitations, or digestive troubles, and so on — that is to say, will provoke all the vagal counter-reactions we now know perfectly well.

What therefore do we do with the Electronic Ear so that, in so little time, anxiety falls, the state of euphoria appears and the desire to communicate manifests itself with such intensity? I believe that we simply allow the eardrum to tighten in such a way that, at a given moment, it vibrates at a minimum so as to avoid vagal repercussion and to become then truly a sound-transmitting apparatus.

XIV. — New theory of auditory physiology: the sulcus tympani

But from there, how is sound to be transmitted to reach the inner ear? Is it to take the ossicular chain situated in the middle ear to reach the oval window? I do not think so. And it is now that a new theory of auditory physiology is going to be specified, bringing into play paths quite different from those that have hitherto supported the hypotheses of audition specialists. It is a psycho-physiological theory I should like to evoke here, for the human ear alone can, by means of an exceptional adaptation, hear only what it is pleased to hear.

For the things we are interested in listening to, we strain our ear. Now, to strain one’s ear is, at a moment of concentration on listening, to gather the sound that penetrates us from all sides, through the skin, the skeleton, and so on, and to transmit it to the auditory vesicle that is the bony labyrinth; there, a distribution is to be made according to a learned dispatching realised by the psyche. I think it would really be useful to reconsider human physiology under a new angle and following a wholly different approach from that adopted by our contemporaries and their predecessors. Man is not a frog that withdraws its leg as soon as it is excited. This is true to a certain extent and under certain circumstances. If one puts the hand on something very hot, one withdraws it at once of course; but one often puts the hand on certain things without withdrawing it. There exists a kind of free will that means one can choose. In the domain of listening, it is the same. No one can force me to hear, and still less to listen, if I do not wish it. And that is why it is absolutely indispensable to rethink the psycho-physiology of the ear, to consider human sensory apparatuses not as those of animals but as antennae projected by man to hear or to listen, to see or to look. There always exists a previsional intentionality that means we shall use or not use our sensory apparatuses to communicate with the outside world.

We are therefore at the point of wondering by where sound passes. Current surgery of cophosis (that is, of deafness) shows that sound does not precisely pass through the ossicular chain. The proof is that, when one practises a trephination of the external part of the external semicircular canal of the ear (as Lempert suggested) — that is to say, when one drills a hole in this canal, a hole that has nothing to do with what the round and oval windows are — the subject suddenly begins to hear, which is absolutely aberrant with respect to the auditory physiology currently admitted. On the other hand, the theory of hydraulic mechanics (as Békésy demonstrated) is still far from satisfactory and cannot justify the results obtained by deafness surgeons.

Which proves that sound passes elsewhere. But by where then does it pass? To try to give an answer to this question so important to us who work solely with sounds, it seems necessary to take up again, first, the study of the eardrum. We shall first remark that it has the possibility of building muscle or losing muscle, that it may even, by its intrinsic structure, enrich itself with fibres or on the contrary fade easily, according to whether the subject knows or does not know how to use his eardrum to listen. In certain people such as otosclerotics, who do not hear and who practically no longer use their eardrum, one may see the stirrup in the middle chamber, through the eardrum membrane, as if there were before this ossicle something diaphanous (it should be noted that the two other ossicles are situated higher in the cavity of the middle ear). By contrast, in those who have a well-tensed and well-muscled ear, one can see nothing through the eardrum. A beautiful luminous cone then presents itself, witness to perfect tonicity; and in the lower part, notably where the arches insert themselves, the arciform fibres of Fumagali, one finds an eardrum very well built, very well structured.

I specify to you that the eardrum (or, more exactly, the tympanic membrane, for the tympanum is anatomically the hole into which the membrane is inserted) enters a thick furrow called the “sulcus tympani” and that allows the eardrum to attach itself strongly to the bony wall with the help of extremely solid fibres. The play will consist in the membrane being sufficiently stretched so that the impedance (that is to say the minimum resistance to the message to pass) is that of the underlying bone. At that moment, there exists a tension such that the peripheral bone of the sulcus (which lets the sound pass referentially at the frequency of 2,000 Hz) becomes the transmitter of sound towards the petrous pyramid in which the bony labyrinthine vesicle is found. The latter is made of an extremely dense bone like that of the lower part of the middle ear that connects it to the sulcus tympani. It is found suspended in the petrous pyramid, which is made of light trabeculations, as if all were studied so that there should be no transmission elsewhere except through the external part of the bony labyrinth.

In other words, any sound information we receive is transmitted immediately by bone conduction to the labyrinthine vesicle. When I say “bone conduction”, I mean “conduction via the whole skeleton of the ear” and not via the ossicular chain. The latter is not destined, in my view, to transmit sound, but to regulate the pressures of the fluid contained in the cochlea. It plays a pressure-regulating, impedance-adapting role and only intervenes at the end of the course to give the last turn of the key that will determine the conscious perception of sound and allow transmission to the brain. It is impossible for me to dwell here on the mechanisms engaged in the inner ear after the membranous labyrinth contained in the bony labyrinth. A whole play of pressures will intervene and allow the more or less fine analysis of sound information on the basilar membrane. And it is then that the stirrup and the whole ossicular chain of the middle ear will enter the scene to ensure or block the functioning of the inner ear.

XV. — Specifically human audiogyry

A more thorough study of this new theory of auditory physiology must be published shortly in a book on “human listening”. We may, if you wish, return to it at the next congress. In the meantime, I think that thanks to the hypotheses just proposed to you, you will be able to lean over this vast problem of auditory physiology. These hypotheses have at least the merit of being able to explain, to a large extent, the results we obtain under Electronic Ear, results that no current theory can justify. Moreover, they cannot meet any valid objection on the physiological plane. That is why it becomes urgent to propose them to all those who are searching in one direction.

Before closing, I should like to say a few words on audiogyry, to which allusion was made in the work titled “Éducation et Dyslexie”. This audiogyry, specifically human, brings to light the use man has made of his ear to communicate with his environment with the help of language.

To better understand this essential function, it seems necessary to study what happens in animals, and to observe the progression towards man, or rather the mutation at the level of the human being. The more an animal is evolved, the more it will direct itself towards phenomena of accommodation. In a bird, for instance, one observes that its vision is monocular, and then, gradually, one arrives in the mammal at a bi-use. And in the monkey, bi-use will take place in such a way that, under the command of the 2nd pair (optic nerve), there will be convergence and association of the movements of the eyes and the head; these will place the 3rd, 4th, 6th and 11th pairs under the sway of the 2nd pair. That is to say that the animal will be able to turn its eyes in all directions, up and down, as it wishes, and that it will also be able to turn its head as it wishes if it wants to see. This is the maximum stage children who are not invested with the spoken function can reach. As long as one does not name things, one behaves as such. One lives, to be sure, in a visual universe, but from the moment things are named, from the moment verbal memorisation appears, from the moment there is desire to communicate, to go towards the other, there is subjection of this whole set to the labyrinthine function. It seems therefore that the 2nd pair has under its dependence the geniculate bundle and that, thanks to multiple anastomoses, it surrenders itself entirely to the 8th pair. It is known that the so-called “caloric” tests by water irrigation in an ear prove the action of the labyrinth on vision, by the appearance of a nystagmus.

XVI. — The child’s language: towards silence

In sum, if one observes the progression of the animal towards man, one notes that the summit of animal organisation is opto-oculo-cephalogyre, while in man it is audio-opto-oculo-cephalogyre or, in shortcut, “audiogyric” — that is to say, subjected to audition. It seems therefore that we are essentially induced by the desire to communicate and to speak. But if this desire does not exist, humanisation becomes impossible.

I think it is time now to part. I should however like to say a further word on what we evoked this morning regarding Oedipus and language. We spoke briefly, you doubtless remember, of this passage from structure to structure; I think that psycho-linguistics, in a later approach, will have to study on the psycho-physiological plane the different stages of language. The first are easy; it is simple babble, then babbling, then stammering. But as soon as one broaches true language, the difficulty begins by the fact that with the same words, one may express different things. This is important, and I should like to insist on this point a few moments before we part.

When a child says a simple word, it is a whole extremely dense syntax that he expresses in condensed form. As linguists, we always make a fundamental error in not wishing to consider this as language, when it is a whole discourse to be deciphered. When a child says “pipi”, it means “bring me the pot at once. I need it, otherwise there will be a catastrophe”. This reminds me of an absolutely delicious child’s word that evoked this: “But no, Mummy, it is not a catastrophe, it is a pipistrophe”. Well, it is all this that the child wishes to express in this single word; it is all there: the phrasing, the punctuation, the tone. Likewise, when he calls “Mummy”, it can signify a thousand things.

This kind of linguistic telescoping takes place at the beginning of the child’s life, when he begins to stand. And it is when he takes his first steps, when he begins to move about in space, that the sentence will enter 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, gradually, he becomes aware that the other exists, that the other-object 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.

Source: A. A. Tomatis, “Nouvelles théories sur la physiologie auditive — application de l’oreille électronique”, lecture given at the 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Paris 1972 (nineteen pages). Digitisation of the document by Christophe Besson, 4 June 2010. Document from the personal archives of Christophe Besson.