Where has my body gone? The ideological-ontological hiatus

Communication presented at the Congress of the Association Française d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie*,* Bordeaux, 22 November 1981*, by* Dr J. Raynaud*.*

Where has my body gone? The ideological-ontological hiatus — concerning theories on language and learning. Against a Western science that has evacuated the body from the question of language, the author confronts Chomsky’s mentalism, the dialectical materialism of the Soviets (Sechenov, Pavlov, Léontiev, Luria), the Marxist anthropology of Morin and Piattelli-Palmarini, and Marcel Jousse’s anthropology of the gesture, to rejoin Tomatis’s audio-psycho-phonological practice: speech as resonant sonic symbol*, grounded in the maternal voice and the symbolic function, irreducible to any purely genetic or strictly materialist explanation.*

The leave granted to the body by linguistics

Monsieur Vendryès was a professor of linguistics, and it is he — I have been told — who said one day: “Once and for all, we shall no longer speak of problems of the origin of language.”

It seems that at present, in our Western culture — I underline the word — this principle is strictly observed. We can demonstrate that this is at the origin of the maintenance of a serious ambiguity, an ambiguity derived from the very existence of linguistic science itself.

This ambiguity is serious by the fact that the human sciences, at least in our Western system, are no longer effectively interested in the origin of language, admitting that the problem is resolved, that it is science that will resolve it. The ambiguity lies, in our view, in the fact that this is only a simple hypothesis, implicitly admitted as a first truth, without its hypothetical character ever being called into question: that is to say, not only does one no longer enquire about the origins, but one admits that the problem is resolved.

Now the way in which one answers the question of the origin of spoken language — whether innate language, autogenerated by the animal-man, the product of a happy evolution, hence object-language of the world like man himself; or language acquired, received, at least bearing values transcendent to the material world, making of the animal man an exceptional being — is not at all neutral and profoundly marks people’s destiny. Therefore this question must be taken into consideration in the human sciences.

That is to say that one must refuse the ambiguity suggested by a science that begins, all the same, to question itself about its ultimate finality as about its origins, to question itself also about the need for a scientific ethic in the dangerous march towards progress. Such will be our attitude.

The detour by the other “languages”: an evasion

But Professor Vendryès saved his case, if one may say so, and he wrote: “There are several kinds of language. There is olfactory language and tactile language, visual language and auditory language. Visual language is probably as ancient as auditory language.”

It is somewhat as if this affirmation had made its way… Since then, the psycho-sociologist Mac Luhan has well shown that the dialectic oral language / written language divided the world.

But must we resolve ourselves so easily to such a partition? Furthermore, will one write in terms describing clearly what Professor Vendryès did in the line of his first principle — remaining prisoner of this dialectic of the eye, of the written language, and strictly linked to the Western world, rationalising and analysing — to the point that one forgets that man is first and foremost a speaking being?

To be prisoner of the written language is quite simply to be prisoner of linguistics too; we hope to show that what may be said of language and of speech is not limited to the contributions of a linguistics that is itself partial.

But differently, as Professor Vendryès does, so many languages still means referring to the body. And it is well through his body that man can know the world and the other… A central question therefore as regards language, which also poses the problem of origin.

The theories in presence — looking for the body

Bio-anthropology, whose developments are recent — at the initiative of E. Morin and M. Piattelli-Palmarini — summarises the most advanced theses of the most competent in the biological and human sciences. Now, if not in biology, may we hope to find the body and the way in which language is generated?

The key words of the answers given here, in a work whose aim is the unity of man, are easy to bring out. Everything turns around the problem of universals and the search for self-organising systems. The model is that of genetics. The problem of origins is settled by the adoption of the Darwinian perspective and the intervention of chance, chance first of all genetic that has brought man to his speaking form.

Everything can be summed up around a conception that may be described as mentalist: “The problem of knowledge and thought is of syntactical essence.” It therefore suffices for the sciences — biological and human — to pay attention to the systems of functioning of the human psyche, which are universals at the basis of the principles of functioning of the human psyche — the famous “self-organising systems” in which would be found the ultimate solution of the existential and cognitive approaches of man.

The Chomsky option: language as universal innate structure

The essential is here in a model inspired by genetics that suggests that the microcosm of microscopic molecular structures dictates its laws to the macrocosm — that is to say to the body and to its essential determinisms.

On the plane of language, it is the adoption of the Chomsky perspective without any ambiguity — that is to say that the universals are syntactic, common to all languages, genetically inscribed in the code of a universal deep structure. From there, surface structures — that is to say the differences from language to language — are explained only by differences between the various cultural environments.

Spoken language is here contingent in relation to a syntax genetically inscribed, the basis of language and thought.

Psychoanalytic theories — essentially Freudian — are integrated in this model of self-organisation of man, by way of a universality of the Oedipus, of a self-organisation of desire, at the basis of the functioning of the human machine through speech; the mode of auto-generation of desire — the essential motor of man — represents, it seems, a thesis that has set psychoanalysis fleeing in implicit fashion, an idea whose scope seems to us considerable.

In short, we are in the presence of a new Promethean myth, rationalist and scientifically constructed by biologists, sociologists and psychologists, convinced of the universality of language and very influenced by Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, methodical rationalism.

The opposite perspective: Soviet linguistics

Our commitment as an audio-psycho-phonologist, if a choice had to be made, should it incline us towards the materialist Marxist perspective developed by the Soviets?

Indeed, the importance and primacy of spoken language are ceaselessly affirmed, while in the West speech is placed in the second rank.

Furthermore, the gesture, at the basis of thought-language, evidently reintroduces the body in function. While reference to Piaget is frequent in Léontiev, against the grave Saxo distinctions in the transmission through the sense of sense. According to him, they are essential but universally widespread on the globe, is universal of which the Western bio-anthropologists do not speak at all — one forgets, with us, in France.

Lastly, for my part and very profoundly, the Russian genius widely exceeds Marxist-Leninist ideology… and I think I can demonstrate it.

The Soviet theory of reflection — Sechenov, Pavlov, Léontiev

Sechenov: sensation as reflex act

Léontiev quotes Sechenov at length about his theory of psychic reflection. It appears to us indisputably definite and represents a necessary underpinning, as well as an encouragement, to our already engaged research.

The central idea of Sechenov is, indeed, that sensation is a psychic phenomenon in reaction to material reality. The schema of the reflex act is here preserved, and sensation must be considered as a phenomenon that can only emerge in the composition of a reflex act, with its motor consequences, notably.

Sechenov distinguishes proximal receptors (that is to say, organised motor receptors, of contact) and receptors at a distance (such as visual and auditory receptors).

He tells us that an immobile eye is as blind as an astereognosic hand. Sechenov affirms: without the participation of movement, our sensations and our perceptions would not have the quality of objectivity, that is to say of relation to objects of the outside world, which alone makes them psychic phenomena.

He underlines that “all our ideas of the surrounding world, so complex and so scientifically rich, are ultimately founded on the elements furnished to us by our muscles”.

Pavlov: cortical structuration by signalisation

This thesis culminates in the concept of analyser at the cerebral level of Pavlov: the brain would structure itself through this conception of a function of analysers, thus forming true functional systems capable of processing the various acting agents, of discriminating them and of synthesising the elements in the form of a signification of signalisation.

Luria: centrality of spoken language in the cortex

Luria, for his part, has well shown how at the cerebral level this conception, central moreover to spoken language, allows the elucidation of a certain number of partial cognitive mechanisms implicated in reading, writing, speech — mechanisms still little significant and difficultly reducible.

But in this conception, “the work of the brain, this organ of the psyche, is still strictly determined by the objective relations of the existing properties of the outside world, and adequately reflecting these relations”.

The risk of a materialist drift

Here, we must be clear: we can only accept this absolute affirmation, pure and simple application of materialist Marxist ideology. The central question of language escapes here, that of the symbolic capacity of man, specific, unique and unexplained to this day, and which — in our view — escapes by its essence materialist determinisms, that is to say an exclusive determinism by the milieu.

We remain, of course, in this option on the subject.

Convergences with Tomatis: Léontiev on the ear

One may illustrate Sechenov’s conception through the following example. By feeling the object and following its contours, the hand reproduces its dimensions and its shape and, via the signals starting from its motor apparatus, fixes their moulding in the brain. At the end of development, the retina of the cut eye is properly speaking the retina of an eye initially instructed by the hand.

This conception, incontestably, allows the reintroduction of the body in all its functional materiality in its relation to the real.

But one cannot test, in this conception, a dynamic of movement — touch — eye, and the problem of the ear is not fully broached in what touches us for the privileged interest of this conception, which is distinguished from the West, lodged in a dynamic of visual oculotropy and the mental, for example what is between Freud and Piaget.

The question is well posed by Léontiev: “One of the motor senses is, no doubt, the auditory organ; the ear is, indeed, a free sense, isolated from the system of praxis, from the apparatus of external muscular movements; it is the very example of a contemplative organ.”

One can object two capital things here:

The vestibule forms part of the ear and participates in the balance of the body, in the maintenance of the position of the head in space, in posture in general, in the perception of rhythms, and it maintains close connections with the cerebellums, coordinators of the movements of the limbs;
The ear controls phonation as a sensor — that is to say, through the musculature of the nasopharynx, the vocal cords, breathing, it controls the emission and vibration of the air that creates sounds through the rhythm-melody of speech, as Tomatis has well shown. Which amounts to saying that without an ear, man cannot ordinarily produce sound.

Moreover, what Léontiev develops at length on the ear constitutes incontestably the experimental basis of our audio-phonological practice, which means we can make of him one of our greatest initiators. I take up this term with Dostoyevskian resonance on purpose…

Tonal deafness and musical ear

Indeed, in his chapter on “the biological and the social in the psyche of man”, Léontiev emphasises that man differs from the animal by his capacity to create signification.

Léontiev develops in detail a whole experimentation very precise and very scientific on the tonal ear, characterising the musical ear, and the timbral ear, characterising thus by the ear in spoken language.

This seems to mean that for him the biological and the social, in their relation to the psyche of man, pass through this whole problem of auditory sensation. The analysis bears on the capacity to differentiate pitches of sound, that is to say the musical ear.

He shows that tonal deafness — that is, the inability to differentiate pitches of sound — is a frequent problem in man. He experiments how one can analyse this capacity of the ear in an absolute way through pure tones and in a more physiological way by bringing in the timbre factor, which solicits the whole fact of perceiving phases of pitches, of which a certain number of patients are masters. He establishes there, plainly, the conditions of functioning of the ear in spoken language.

He demonstrates in a scientific way, by placing himself within Sechenov’s reflexological theory, that under the influence of action — that is to say by making the patient himself sing the pitches to be heard and to be discriminated — one considerably improves the discrimination capacities of his ear.

This is the foundation of our practice that Tomatis anteriorly codified, having introduced the reality of the lateralisation of the ear.

Jakobson, Tomatis and the maternal voice

Lastly, it must be recalled that in 1960 appeared Jakobson’s book on “The phonic framework of language”, which takes off from the fundamental linguistics of Léontiev’s ideas, against grave Saxo distinctions, non-essential in the transmission of meaning. According to him, they are essential but universally widespread on the globe, is universal of which Western bio-anthropologists do not speak at all.

We cannot moreover forget that it is Tomatis who, the first, proposed, in the perspective of listening, to examine the capacity to distinguish pitches and high frequencies — a capacity without great scope on the plane of communication.

A capacity currently still generally neglected in the clinical examination of the ear, but which our specific experience shows us plays significantly in the learning of the mother tongue, as of foreign languages.

Lastly, always with reference to Léontiev, one may note that it has now been established that variations of meaning, in the emission as in the reception, appear to be carried by essential pre-eminences for a total communication in the sense, semantic-linguistic, integrated by the left cerebral hemisphere, and the affective-expressive setting of speech, integrated by the right cerebral hemisphere.

The voice is indeed, for Jakobson, an essential element “that poses the problem of inscriptions between verbal coda down to the ultimate constituents” phonetic, of course, and central neurological processes.

Incontestably, Léontiev and the Soviet researchers lead us to the idea of a brain that is structured in interaction with reality, in which auditory perception concerning the body with motor implication, the spoken language, taken from motoricity and movement, play a fundamental and determining role in its structuring.

It is important to note that Wernicke’s ideas on the lateralisation of the hand reconstitute themselves in this affirmation.

But Léontiev and the Soviet scholars do not speak, at least to our knowledge, of the mother’s voice.

The maternal voice — key to learning and lateralisation

Tomatis alone has drawn attention to the mysterious difference in length of the two laryngeal nerves, of certain vocal cords — the only bilateral muscles to be asymmetric, the left being longer than the right.

This would imply in the mother an asymmetric command of the cords, the influx arriving later on the right than on the left.

Likewise, Husson, who is not Soviet, but to our knowledge, has done works of Mac Léontievici, antenatal, that show that the half of the longest, on the left, hypertrophy at the functioning of self-low-in-parisitan that bring about the shift of the influx, by length, compensated exactly by the acceleration of production in evolving.

It must be well demonstrated here, its non-orthography in the course of a mechanism provoking learning, the action of speech.

Ascending which leads to its construction, hence a harmonisation of the functioning of language while the hemispheres acquire to individualise and a new one, an experience functional, dominant lateralisation, centred on the problem of speech and the left cerebral hemisphere.

Two things appear remarkable here:

the importance of motor retroactive effects through speech that Léontiev emphasised;
the fact of the mother’s speech, which regulates the supply between mysteriously diachronised on the motor plane and the asymmetry of length of the two laryngeals.

But, to return to Léontiev, his conclusion on the chapter on “the biological and the social in the psyche of man” did not lead, as we might have hoped, to these essential questions concerning the dry, the body and language…

Two massive affirmations

The materialist-critic departs in the chapter on the dry and the body:

“The faculties of man are not virtually contained in his brain. If the brain contains virtually, it is not such and such specifically human aptitudes, but only the aptitude for the formation of aptitudes.”
“It is the world that brings to man what he has of truly human. The process of appropriation takes place in the course of the development of the body and the psyche, related to the development of the subject and of his life; these processes are determined by the historical, concrete, social conditions in which he lives and the way in which he lives the form in these conditions.”

Let it be clear that, in our view, these affirmations seem unacceptable, and a little is in our opinion, like also left in order not to yield to reality.

Indeed, if man really has the capacity to create language and symbolism, it would be a matter of something that is the means of a personal relation. That is to say, through individual dynamics, more or less conscious, of evolution of man, each man would create himself from a new point, specific to a true sense; it is the dialectic of realities of the social and concrete world that brings him.

This is particularly evident in great deprived persons, immortal in struggle, where transcendental contribution to the world has become evident and cannot be brought down in, a priori, without any other in the world.

The symbolic function — beyond materialism

Likewise we may, in its place, choose between mentalist theories, the reducing foundation, and the bio-anthropology and Soviet reflexological theories contradictory to absolute psychology.

We have now to formulate our own theory, knowing that we are Turks here accused of the danger of ideology — dreaded false because diverting its fundamental systems from complex reality and our presence, reality that cannot be communicated unworthily.

This theory, in our view, must:

respect and integrate the partial truths already cut out by science;
rediscover the idea of the fundamental rupture that remains at the bottom of all approaches to knowledge and leave the way open to a new, better-founded theory;
go with a dynamic of good senses (of common sense), to another, can only be difficult, instinctively, from open life, deriving from the power to enter at any moment.

Thus, our theory must be founded on a personalist conception of man.

The mother, primordial fusion and the gift of speech

The obligatory reference to the person refers to the whole problem of the mask through which the true senses pass.

Man therefore wishes first of all to be alive, and the body resonates with the stimulations of the world. He summarises himself more or less perfectly from these stimulations and that according to his characteristic unique personal history, and he resonates first to the sense of the voice — a truth now scarcely debatable.

It is the mother who transmits the gift of speech, who keeps the privilege of being the primordial initiator, as the first of the differentiation of the person, through her capacities of childbirth and of listening.

Here is the mother, the unique person, bearer of the Law of the world through the language of a given culture; and the fundamental character of the person of crossings is, in this extraordinary complex and problematic interaction between a woman’s speech and a child’s ear, that the whole body of children appears as receiver of senses and creator of sense.

The mother will first be mediator of relations with the milieu and the Father. Others, and she incontestably instils this capacity of resonance that founds the person.

The giant cascade question, wholly linked to the preceding, is then that of accession to the symbolic function — fundamental, essential, universal attribute of the human person, of the speaking person.

The symbolic function proper

A problem far more important to raise than the central thought of man and of the inquiry that appear to be the being or the having.

How is liberated the aptitude to structure aptitudes, as the Russian-maritime savants told us, a case of genetic ideal, our primordial. The self-organising function of knowledge, gloves of knowledge at the level of speaking thought.

Hypotheses thus contradictory to one or the other, at least obvious:

the first denies the personalist aspect of individual consciousness; the other artificially raises thought from the biological body deaf to the apparently repetitive of reality, acting on the apparently repetitive of reality, acting on the sensori-motor capacities.

What is the symbolic function?

it is consubstantial with the cognitive approach of man, with his capacity of resonance to the world;
it is the capacity to extract arbitrarily a signification from the complex real that surrounds it through the mechanism of identification — imitation by the body;
it is also signification in the other and must be interpreted by him in his own cognitive approach: it refers to the concept of human coexistence, to the coalescence of subject and object, that is to say that it can only justly be cited in a phenomenological conception of knowledge;
it refers directly to an interrogation of knowledge, to the essence of knowledge, strongly founded on the psycho-sensori-motor reaction to the world and to others, preserving the idea of a fundamental truth of this approach, essentially unfathomable and universal, but vehicle of universal values.

Spoken language seems to us to be the summit of the symbolic function.

Critique of the arbitrariness of the sign

This implies that we contest in the most energetic way the principle of the absolute arbitrariness of the linguistic sign enunciated by De Saussure and the object of a quasi-religious belief in the West.

One sees well that conversely, indeed, the symbolic function would stop at the oculo-graphic aspect and would not extend to sound.

Others than we, and eminent linguists, are in agreement on these arguments in this direction.

A single most evident demonstration of the Saussurean principle of the absolute arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is the urinal vortex. One of the first words of the child to designate his mother is plainly first symbolic and not arbitrary.

Indeed, there is a deep analogy here around the buccal gesture of suction towards the sa of the mother by the child, which becomes at a given moment bearer of meaning, which is also a synthetic, meaningful approach of the desired intussusception, the value of which is absolutely unique and irreducible in time.

But as in almost all — universal to all cultures — it marks this fundamental and reflex passage to the symbol as name.

And that the word refers us to the mother, that it marks a very important stage of the symbolic function, seems to us a fundamental anthropological problem. It brings out the question of phonic symbolism as originary and founding of knowledge.

Psychiatrists know well that one must be concerned about a child who does not say mama.

Marcel Jousse and the anthropology of the gesture

It is Jousse who at the same time had to bring out here this passage from the bodily gesture to sound and to meaning, and it operates, according to him, through the mask.

Before Mac Luhan, he focused his attention in spectacular fashion on the extreme tragic to elucidate the mechanisms of oral-style discourse, of the peoples of the ear, of peoples without writing.

He said: “God disposed little, that man made himself only of gestures; but he has, like nevertheless-youth, only gestures. But his inner life is all tense with these complex succinct ones.”

That is to say, he announces Sechenov.

It appears to us quite significant that a religious such as Jousse, who developed his teaching at the Sorbonne moreover, rejoins the Soviet spine, through the principles of the importance of the motor aspect of language, each remaining in an approach of his own as to his preoccupations.

One might add to this that Bulgakov, great Russian Orthodox philosopher and theologian, former professor of Marxist economics rejoining the Jousse fact on the question of phonic symbolism, at the time when De Saussure was bringing out his postulate.

It is also known that Ukrainian psychologists in the current epic have brought very solid, experimental arguments in favour of the symbolic aspect of human language.

Our works elsewhere in the same direction are auditors in the West.

Jousse thus appears to us to be really the only theoretician of language who permits the founding, even physiologically, of the question of phonic symbolism. As, moreover, he begins the works of Jouvet: sleep in effirme that “dream is a global incessant kinetic re-play”.

Intussusception and laryngo-buccal praxis

Jousse, indeed, shows in an evident way how this capital passage from oculo-manual praxes — the basis of human gesture and mimism, mimeticism of interactions with the real world — to curicular laryngo-buccal praxes takes place.

For him, spoken language is the expression of the whole being, by “intussusception” of manual bodily gestures.

“Intussusception” being a neologism of his invention, equivalent to the interiorisation of action in Soviet theories, the basic mechanism, one might say, of the symbolic function.

The new ocular-bodily praxis would thus become, by transposition, laryngo-buccal curicular praxis.

Jousse speaks there of an irrepressible tendency: the whole problem is well in this sonorised passage through the ear, mystery of the cognitive capacity of man, source of his liberty.

For Jousse, then, “nuances are at the origin of language”: nuances, the word for which would owe its origin to the word mother.

Rhythm and phonemes: convergence with Jakobson

These considerations on energetic rhythms, rhythmo-melodism, rhythmo-semantism, are quite significant of the importance of discriminations of the parameters of sounds of oral language in the integration of meaning at the level of the nervous system, announcing here too the recent work of Jakobson.

He shows how the consonant differentiated from the gesture in the sound, while the universal vowel and stuff finally the rhythm-melody through intensity-duration.

He too poses the problem of tonal languages, leaning on the vowel — a common preoccupation with Léontiev and rich in currently quite significant neurophysiological observations.

Jousse emphasises the importance of the laryngeal breath, hence of respiration, imprinting, reinforcing the bilateralisation of the bodily gesture of spoken language, reproduced in writing.

In this regard and while today Foucault and some linguists partisans of a direct accession, by the eye, to significations (referring all language of the eye to Vendryès) seemed to wish to bring back into fashion the Chinese ideogram, Jousse inspired the so beautiful thesis of Tchang Tch’eng-Ming in 1937 on “Chinese writing and the human gesture”.

It is a brilliant study on the archaic ideograms dating from 1400 years BC. It shows that these characters are nothing but the transposition first of gestures and then of phonetic discriminations. Modern ideographic characters are finally only a deformation of the archaic originals by arbitrary stylisation… The supreme attempt of the lettered to divert knowledge to his own benefit… The central phenomenon of the whole problem of the written.

Jousse created the word algebrosis to speak of current languages, of countries of writing very distant from the originary spontaneity of gestural-oral language.

For Jousse, “words are dead fragments of a living gestural set, of what he calls a propositional gesture”.

The propositional gesture

The propositional gesture is the living syntheticism of man facing nature, like that of the free child vis-à-vis the living world.

A concrete example will suffice to suggest what is at stake and to show what might correspond to the original symbolic language, the founding stage of man in the child:

In French, one designates a man who mows by the phrase: “il fauche avec sa faux”. There is little relation between signifier and signified. One can retain only a vague analogy in the gesture of sweeping evoked by fauch…

In Russian, the same phrase is said cosic, cosoï, a veritable propositional gesture centred on the repetition of sound, very evocative of the scythe, without superfluous artifice, an expression immediately evocative of the lived gesture and of the repetitive interaction with the grass to be cut down.

Those who have not understood must at all costs learn to mow…

For my part, Jousse’s terrible phrase: “the grapheme gives death, the breath gives life” brutally reminded me that I was writing — I was writing to be able to speak to you of Marcel Jousse…

Conclusion — speech as resonant sonic symbol

Thus seems to have come the time of the conclusion:

It is capital to ask oneself about the origins of language, and we believe we have demonstrated that the way in which one answers this question is not at all neutral in the daily practices of the sciences of man, from pedagogy to psychology and therapy.
There are not languages; there is a spoken language that involves the whole body, that involves the Being to the world of the speaking subject through auditory sensation.
Speech is founding of man; it is the supreme symbol of living man, sonic symbol endowed, unfolding in time.
A signified symbol, speech is bearer of affective modulation and of semantic modulation, both inscribing themselves differently at the level of the cerebral hemispheres associated in its passage.
Through its rhythm-semantism, sympathised by the sound that bears the meaning, all the meaning of such a woman or such a man, speech through its sonic discriminations invites us to the other, invites to resonance.
And through its personal history of the one who speaks — that is, with the way in which he has been able to individualise himself from the primordial fusion with the mother and from the hazards of personal adventure (the ever-present temptation to feel oneself a victim or to make the other a victim) — it resonates with his way of holding a certain truth on the world and on others; knowledge that refers to the way in which each man or woman has been able to motorly integrate the surrounding reality, from which he cannot be wholly, artificially separated.

This invitation to resonance is in reality an indissociable whole; it represents a meaning, an absolutely unique signification in the cosmos, that evolves in time, defined at every instant — the temporal trajectory of the speaking person from his birth to his death. Expressed or secret, speech is the permanent sonic symbol of the speaking person and must be interpreted as such.

The unity of man can be realised only around speech, as around the symbolic function — that is, the unique and unreproducibly identical possibility of creating meaning through sound, the origin of which refers first to the mystery of human consciousness and to the values transcendental to the material world that it traverses.

— Dr J. Raynaud, communication at the Congress of the Association Française d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, Bordeaux, 22 November 1981.