The Multidisciplinary Aspects of Audio-Psycho-Phonology
Communication presented at the 5th International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology*,* Toronto, 1978*, by* Léna A. Tomatis*.*
To wish to approach audio-psycho-phonology under its multidisciplinary aspect is incontestably to take a risk: that of seeing the notion of unity disappear as there gradually emerge the numerous domains to which audio-psycho-phonology belongs, into which it penetrates, with which it cohabits. It is not excessive to say that it seems to be interested in everything, and that it interests everyone. It is even said in the corridors that it touches everything, that it heals everything. I do not think that it ought to be considered a panacea — but I can nonetheless affirm that it is present in many places where it was not expected.
Why, then, is one astonished to find it at school, in the family, in the psychologist’s office, in the consulting room of the psychiatrist or the psychoanalyst, at the Conservatoire of music and singing, in the language laboratory, with the speech therapist, in the physiotherapist’s treatment room? Why is one surprised to hear that with the Electronic Ear one can treat dyslexia as well as nervous depression, psychomotor delays, vocal deficiencies, stammering, autism, difficulties in integrating foreign languages?
Why then — by touching the ear, or rather listening, since it is indeed of this that we are speaking — can one hope to penetrate domains so vast and so varied? Why accept, following Tomatis, that everything must pass through the hole of the ear, to use his favourite expression? Why accept in a single block his sallies which proclaim that one speaks, one says, one sings, one dances with one’s ear; that one verticalises, one energises, one lateralises oneself, thanks to the ear?
I appreciate each day this saying so often repeated by my husband: “Nothing is so multidimensional as unity.” Perhaps audio-psycho-phonology approaches, in its triptych, a tri-une, a unity of a certain level — that very place where the global vision is easier, where the interdisciplinary interweavings become self-evident; that very place where the compartments disappear to the benefit of fusions; that very place where there are no longer any frontiers.
A science, a methodology, a philosophy
APP is a science and not a simple technique, as some believe. It is a human science and not a medical science, as some are pleased to think. It is a science from which emerge a methodology and a philosophy. From these two entities, an approach at once highly elaborate and very simple will allow us to apprehend, with means hitherto unused, the profound mechanisms relating to the phenomena of communication of the being with his environment — first within the maternal womb (for this approach operates from the emergence of the embryo into the uterine night), until birth and the first months of life; then with the horizon widening, in relation with the father, then with the school and finally within the society into which this being must integrate.
The methodology derives from a long experience which, over the years, has allowed the laying of the foundations of a discipline and the consolidation of the schema proposed. The philosophy that emanates from it leads us along a way which brings us back to the most authentic concepts that make of the human being the very object of language, called by it — as if the latter wished to manifest itself in an informational dynamic responding to an ontological desire for a communal existence.
Each specialist concerned by this new approach should not feel in it a dangerous competitor and ask, as we have so often heard said: “But then, what is to become of me?” He should know how to welcome it as an element of explanation regarding problems hitherto considered insoluble, to welcome it as an element of activation of his own discipline.
The Tomatis Effect: audition and phonation
The first element to be considered is, without any doubt, the intimate relation that exists between audition and phonation. This fact, now well known under the name of the Tomatis Effect, is at the very foundation of audio-psycho-phonology techniques: “Any imposed change in the auditory input triggers a different structure of the bucco-pharyngo-laryngeal output.”
Such a mechanism will allow easy understanding of how, by touching the manner in which a subject hears and listens, one can obtain a modification of his voice, his phonation, his articulation, his language. It is therefore no surprise to see the Electronic Ear — an apparatus capable of effecting these audio-vocal modifications — come to the assistance of the educator, the speech therapist, the singing teacher. It is no surprise to see it installed at the heart of the language laboratory and of the expression room.
In the school: from primary to the language laboratory
In school, the kindergarten or primary teacher will use it for children presenting some difficulties in oral or written language. A deepened voice, retarded expression, articulatory disorders, confusion of sounds will be rapidly resolved, thus allowing the teacher to have at her disposal attentive ears — because freed from the handicaps that threatened to install themselves more deeply.
It is the language teacher who will intervene next, in the course of secondary studies, to give his pupils the English ear, or the French ear, or the German ear — in short, the ethnic ear necessary for the acquisition of a good accent and a correct integration of the language to be studied.
The speech therapist, in turn, will find in the Electronic Ear an effective means of assistance for accelerating the operations of phonetic and linguistic opening, through a better analysis of sounds, a better integration of phonemes, a better listening, in short.
Visual learning passes through the ear
How indeed can one conceive that a learning that everything announces to be essentially visual — reading — should be so specifically corrected by the ear? We shall again call upon the nervous system and its numerous connections which make of it an integrative apparatus of exceptional quality.
The visual apparatus — which has at its disposal the bundle of ocular nerves (IIIrd, IVth and VIth pairs) — is found to be under the control of the VIIIth vestibular pair. There thus exists an interaction whereby a projected letter is a sound translated graphically (and therefore ocularly) under the control of the vestibule, while a letter transposed into its verbal reality can only reach this state through the cochlear sonic superposition, made possible by the vestibular interlocking letter after letter, sound by sound.
Through the interplay of balanced and harmonised actions which is set up between the two elements of the auditory labyrinth — the vestibule on the one hand and the cochlea on the other — it is the whole body that is found to be implicated. The vestibule has a more intimate relation with the spinal, bulbar, pontine and cerebellar parts, while the cochlea is assigned a more specifically cortical territory upon the temporal area.
At the Conservatoire of music and singing
It is to music and singing that my husband owes his earliest experimentations. Having been plunged throughout his childhood in a bath of music, he naturally found again in his otorhinolaryngologist’s consulting room the great voices among his father’s friends — his father himself being a great professional operatic artist. And he was thus able to carry through numerous experiments which allowed him to educate and re-educate, with the help of the Electronic Ear, voices that were lost, damaged, altered.
To pass from the sung voice to the spoken voice, there was only one step to be taken. It was crossed during the re-education of a celebrated actor who was willing to submit to an experiment aiming not only to modify his way of hearing, but also to suppress his control by the right ear. He became a stammerer — momentarily, rest assured — to the great astonishment of those present and above all to the great joy of my husband, who saw thus confirmed the hypotheses he had advanced concerning the directing ear.
Intra-uterine listening: at the psychologist’s, the psychoanalyst’s and the psychiatrist’s
The foetus hears. This fact no longer requires proof. It hears the inner life of its mother and, in particular, her voice. It maintains with her a dialogue which will later remain the very basis of its relation with others. By reconstituting this sonic life, by effecting this return to the source, by reactivating this memorised experience, audio-psycho-phonology makes it possible to give or to give back to the human being the desire to communicate — that desire born of the uterine dialogue and often interrupted in its course by the vicissitudes of existence.
The filtered sounds — that is, the sounds reproducing the sonic foetal life — prove to be a particularly precious aid for the psychotherapist, notably when it is a question of extracting, as it were, a past that seems impossible to root out so emotionally, and often painfully, buried does it appear.
Sometimes even — and the analyst experiences this daily — the consciously evoked re-living of a conflictual situation does not necessarily bring about its resolution, and does not exclude the possibility of an exacerbation with unfortunate consequences. In the course of the cure in filtered sounds, one is present at a true sensory analysis at the deepest level of an experience in which are superposed all the memorisations of an experience cellularly engrammed but not yet cortically integrated.
The filtered sounds exclude the memorised noises of the mother’s intimate life (heart, lungs, intestinal and digestive borborygmi). They also eliminate language considered on the plane of semantic unfolding, so as to gather, in sum, only this voice, this maternal voice, still so rich in semiological value. In its pure state, the result of this filtering leads to a recognition of a sound without memorised support, dangerously integrated.
Once the anterior frontal area is reached, motivation appears, which changes the whole dynamic of therapy. It will suffice to respond to the demand of the patient, who becomes more and more participating, instead of proposing an aid that he would approach in the mode of passive acquiescence sustained by the transferential chain — whose delicate handling is well known. The subject takes charge of himself all the more rapidly as his posture of alertness is effective.
A foreign language like a mother tongue
As for the language teacher, sounds filtered from the language to be studied, and sonic births in this same language, thus reproducing the processes of integration of a mother tongue, will allow the opening of the ear and the psyche to this new linguistic universe: intonation, structure, rhythm will thus be put in place to receive the phonemes specific to the language, and to sustain the verbal dynamic which will lead quite naturally to a perfectly embodied semantics.
This first approach in filtered sounds in the learning of a language also allows the erasing of blockages of a psychological order, the resistances, the inhibitions which often appear on the occasion of entry into another semiological process. Applied linguistics thus seems to be able to benefit from this psycho-genesis of language which, from intra-uterine life, installs the basic structures necessary for ethnic integration.
The vagus nerve: anxiety and psychosomatic medicine
The pneumogastric nerve is, one might say — in function of the regions it innervates — the nerve of anxiety. Of that anxiety viscerally integrated at the very level of the organs, so implicated in all affective life.
These same organs are also impressed during conflictual situations and in certain stressing conditions, by the exuberant richness of the neurovegetative sympathetic innervation. It is in face of this latter network that the vagal nerve operates, and thereby integrates — as flowing from a true dialogue — the imprints bearing anxiety, whose excessive charge destroys, by paralysis or hyperactivation, the harmonious functioning of this nerve which is at once motor, sensory and neurovegetative.
Thus, depending on whether the subject can place himself in a listening attitude to the world that surrounds him, or whether he prefers to dialogue with his own body — to respond to its egoistic resonances — the Xth pair will be more or less governed at the level of tympanic tension. Through this neurological incidence, modified by the cures under the Electronic Ear, audio-psycho-phonology is of particular interest to psychosomatic medicine.
The three functions of the ear
1. The charging function
The first to appear on the phylogenetic plane, it ensures to the cortex the energy it needs to activate the whole organism. This energy is also necessary to feed thought, reflection, creativity. And it is to the ear that the mission of ensuring this energetisation largely falls — at the level of the vestibule on the one hand, and of the cochlea on the other, notably in the zone where the ciliated relays are most numerous, that is, where the high frequencies are projected. This fact will explain to us why Tomatis’s theories devote so much attention to the dynamising value of high frequencies.
2. The function of equilibrium
This particularly concerns the vestibular part of the ear. It will play an important role in the setting in place of verticality, so necessary to linguistic integration. But to say postural verticality is to say antigravity struggle, to say kinetics also, and finally harmonisation of corporeal muscular tone.
3. The function of audition and listening
The one best known — or at least the one we believe we know best — ensures the perception of the sonic world, from the analysis of the most banal acoustic universe to the decoding of the most elaborate language.
Physiotherapy, psychomotricity, sport
The vestibular branch of the auditory nerve holds under its control the innervation of the anterior roots of the spinal cord; and in consequence, the whole motor function benefits from its intervention. It governs the tonus and the harmonious distribution of the tensions necessary for postural reflexes; from these connections, kinetics is also ensured, controlled in the slightest detail.
It is therefore by playing on this vestibular nerve with the help of appropriate sounds and by means of a training of the auditory musculature under the Electronic Ear, that the specialist will be able to act on the body of the handicapped child or adult. Phenomena of relaxation, of muscular release due to a harmonious distribution of tensions and to a rebalancing of posture, will then be registered to face the spastic processes so often encountered.
In psychomotricity, the setting in place of the bodily schema — principally with a view to an improvement of the linguistic function and of the processes of communication — may also have, as its starting-point and not as its end point, a cochleo-vestibular stimulation capable of accelerating the mechanisms of energetisation, lateralisation, verticalisation.
Sport
In the domain of sports, training — so dear to technical directors — may also include an auditory gymnastics capable of:
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increasing self-control and the rate of vigilance through the reinforcement of the right psycho-sensory circuits;
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lengthening the time of resistance to effort, thanks to phenomena of energetisation due to the action of certain auditory stimulations upon the cortex;
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suppressing the inhibitions resulting from emotivity — source of stage fright — during competitions, thanks particularly to the intervention of filtered sounds.
Let us also note, on the relational plane of the sportsman with the rest of the group, a sensible improvement of team spirit through better psycho-social integration of the individual, and through harmonisation of the action of the team-mates — placed thus, thanks to the Electronic Ear, on the same wavelength.
When trainers have understood that, instead of having their future champions perform physical exercises for many hours a day (mention has been made recently of 14 hours of training), it would be preferable to reserve a little time for the setting in place of a high-level system capable of organising and dynamising the corporeal investment that sporting performances represent — we shall then have the right to witness not only remarkable demonstrations of the body deploying its strength and skill, but also a true dialogue of the being with the entire universe through a wholly mastered body.
Conclusion: consciousness as the reunion of the sciences
This unitary approach does not seem to be a view of the mind. It finds its reality of expression in the globality of the actions undertaken and in the generalisation of the fields of application, where everything, in fact, is language and dialogue with the environment.
It was given to me to develop in 1976, at the French National Congress of Pau, the so-to-speak confluent side of APP, in stipulating that it was at the crossroads of the human sciences. I cannot conclude today without specifying that more than a crossroads, it appears that audio-psycho-phonology encompasses within its field of action the human sciences. What does it not encompass, in truth, since it contains within itself language itself?
The better to bring out the polyvalence of audio-psycho-phonology, I should like to insist, by way of conclusion, on its physiodynamising action. It is now known that, thanks to the richness of the stimulations gathered by the ear at the level of the sensitive and sensory organs, the brain can see its corticality more easily activated.
Henceforth, the conscious field lights up and comes alive. The more it becomes active, operational as it were, the more it mobilises, analyses, classifies and reduces to their proper value the different elements that constitute the unconscious.
What audio-psycho-phonology seeks is precisely to light up this consciousness. This is the very aim of the techniques it knows how to use and to emphasise, so that through Listening and thanks to language, this consciousness may situate itself beyond all knowledge — that it may be what it claims to be: the reunion of the sciences.
— Léna A. Tomatis, communication to the 5th International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Toronto, 1978.