On the Test Bench
On the Test Bench — The Tomatis Listening Test
Feature published in 1985* in a French magazine. Main article by* Bernard Montelh*, sidebar “The Imaginary of the Ear” by* Jacques Bril*.*
The voice and the ear: one does not go without the other. Such is the view of Alfred Tomatis, doctor of medicine and specialist of the ear, who asserts that “one sings with one’s ear”. Bernard Montelh insisted on trying out this assessment-test. He recounts the experience.
On the Test Bench — by Bernard Montelh
B., twenty-five, has the ambition of becoming a singer. A beautiful contralto voice, quite rare, has allowed her to enter a conservatoire. She leaves it after a year, dissatisfied, and desperately looks for a teacher who can suit her. A thorny problem: in matters of singing tuition, one wades about happily, and there are almost as many schools as there are teachers.
In despair, B. resolves to go and consult Professor Alfred Tomatis, a physician specialising in the ear and language, whose writings have struck her. Tomatis indeed asserts that he has “treated” numerous singers in difficulty. His principle, a sharp-cut formula such as he loves them: “One sings with one’s ear!”
A painful start to the cure for B.: everything collapses, she can no longer sing. In the end, however, a major surprise: recovering the highs, her voice passes from contralto to dramatic soprano.
Impressed, I wished to try out at least the “listening test” devised by Alfred Tomatis. I had been forewarned: “Even this simple examination may change many things for you.” In practice, however, nothing impressive. First an interview with a psychologist, who mainly endeavours to learn how the mother’s pregnancy went, the birth, the first year. No luck on this score: I know nothing. Next, questions about my character, my susceptibility to fatigue, my relation to music, to noise, and so on.
Second phase: the test proper. Sounds are sent to me through a headset. On the right, then on the left, then… mine to find on which side. The exercise consists in raising my hand as soon as I perceive the sound, which increases gradually in intensity. Then I must indicate whether the sound I hear is higher or lower than the previous one (for each ear). Here, I really have the impression of not knowing, because — Alfred Tomatis will later explain to me — it is a question of the selectivity test, the one which consists in recognising the minute differences of timbre. And tests of oculo-manual lateralisation.
That is all. But it is enough for Tomatis, who receives me a moment later. “You have an exceptional ear, he tells me. An almost ideal curve. Only, you use just a very small part of your potential. The development of your ear has remained blocked at the age of four.”
At four, I then explained, I did indeed have health troubles that took me away from my family for a few months. “That can be the cause. But equally well — it is often the case — a benign incident lived badly. In fact, the cause does not matter, the doctor continues. What matters is the result. And to open this ear of yours. In your case, that is easy. And I guarantee that you will then no longer have the problems of fatigue, of concentration and of memory you have at present.”
The dream! But, I say to myself as a professional sceptic, all this I have more or less mentioned to the psychologist in the preliminary interview. “You like to sing? my interlocutor continues. What voice do you have?
— Hmm… — I understand your hesitation. Your voice is a hidden surprise. But that can easily be sorted out.”
Then come a few other revelations about my difficulties in learning languages, my relations with my parents (rather accurate, and without my having spoken of it beforehand). All this from the mere reading of a curve. “It is long habit, Alfred Tomatis explains. The interpretation of the listening test is not as easy as it seems. It can only be done globally — and almost instantaneously — after much practice. If I made a book on the listening test, it would be a very technical work, reserved for professionals, as has been done for the Rorschach.”
Magical, or method?
I find myself in any event torn between seduction and mistrust. The professor’s analysis — even though he has the scientific means to justify it — seems a little “magical”. The cure proposed — some fifty sessions spread over about a month — has an air of miracle cure. This is doubtless one of the reasons for the hostility provoked just about everywhere by Tomatis and his method. His theories, which he began to elaborate more than thirty years ago (he is today sixty-five), have shocked the medical profession, the psy, the speech therapists…
“For many colleagues, Tomatis is the devil”, asserts one of them. And after many recalls to order, the doctor preferred, long ago, to resign from the medical register. The prices (750 francs for the listening test, several thousand francs for a course of treatment, not refunded by Social Security) do not help matters.
Alfred Tomatis explains himself on this poor reputation in his autobiography(1): too much naivety, unscrupulous collaborators and plagiarists have done him a disservice and forged an image of a tradesman. But there is also “conservatism, resistance to new ideas”.
Let us nevertheless recognise that the father of audio-psycho-phonology does not play the persecuted. Moreover, some of his “outlandish” ideas — notably on the link between voice and ear — are beginning to gather analogous results in other teams.
Witness: Pierre V.
Pierre V., who has training as a psychologist, has followed a course of treatment. Poor pronunciation, school problems, speech therapists: results, but partial. The trigger would come from the reading of a work by Tomatis. “I thought my difficulties came perhaps more from the ear than from the palate. At school, I knew I did not pronounce correctly. But under the Electronic Ear, I heard for the first time the ‘ch’ as it is pronounced. I understood that, until then, I could not pronounce it correctly because I had never heard it correctly.”
In addition to the learning of correct sounds, the education brought him a greater ease in speaking in public, a greater facility in relations with others, and a higher capacity for work. “Not from one day to the next, of course. But when I compare, it is frankly positive”, he asserts, adding that he considers the therapeutic result and not the process.
A “gymnastics” of the ear
According to Tomatis, it is a true “gymnastics” that is set up — “but in which the dumbbells are the mother’s voice, Mozart and Gregorian chant”, the professor explains. His basic postulate: the ear is not only a sensory organ, but a door which allows communication between the individual and the outside world, and also the self-information of the individual. He affirms, for example — and proposes that each may try the experiment — that reading aloud allows better memorisation than silent reading. It is through this function of privileged instrument of communication that the ear touches psychology.
A course of treatment at the “Centre du Langage” is a true “sonic journey” which begins with intra-uterine perception (obtained through a particular filtering of sounds), continues with sonic birth — passage from intra-uterine perception to aerial perception. An experience one does not forget, according to those who have undergone it. Then one goes back up the stages of the opening of the ear, insisting on the points of blockage. Thanks to the profile obtained from the listening test and to regular monitoring, this journey is adapted to the problems of each individual.
“In view of my test, have you something to propose to me?” I finally asked Professor Tomatis. “Absolutely nothing. It is up to you to take the step. I do not go beyond, and that is sometimes useful. Take dancers. They feel rhythms particularly well, but not melodies. If I were to re-educate them completely, they would cease to be good dancers!”
But there it is: Alfred Tomatis’s “revelations” have whetted my appetite. “I am not inventing anything, he says, it is your curve that makes me say that. I repeat that with the ear you have, you should never be tired, for a good ear allows one to recharge oneself with energy. Now you are subject to fatigue…” Ouch — that is true!
“It is rather astonishing, Pierre V. rightly remarked to me. Because he professes original ideas and method, and because he claims to succeed where others fail, one demands of Tomatis a precise evaluation of his results. Do you know many psychotherapists of whom one asks the same thing? Especially as results, he has them. So?”
Come, it is decided: as soon as I get a raise, I shall hurry off to Tomatis. Favourable prejudice. Indeed, I had been forewarned: the listening test is innocuous… but there are consequences.
— Bernard Montelh
(1) L’Oreille et la Vie (itinéraire d’une recherche sur l’audition, la langue et la communication), A.A. Tomatis, Éd. Robert Laffont, coll. Réponses.
The Imaginary of the Ear — by Jacques Bril
Through the (red) thread of time, a whole metaphor has been constituted around the ear. According to Jacques Bril, the ear gives many joys — not all of them of hearing.
Does it suffice to evoke it as the receptive organ of music and speech — those two major organisers of culture — to give an account of the richness of the imaginary investments of which the ear is, everywhere, the object?
By hearing, of course, we enter into communication with the Other, as much to receive confidences, confessions, accounts or orders as melodies and songs. And the sensitivity of souls would doubtless be very different if we did not have access, through hearing, to all these affective messages with which sonic vibrations can be charged. It is moreover to the dispositions of hearing, broadly “understood”, that all sorts of common locutions refer: “to lend an ear”, “to prick up the ears”, “to plug one’s ears”, “to turn a deaf ear”, and many others.
The ear as matrix
But there is more. Destined to receive the Word, that is, the Verb which confers upon the creature his spiritual being, the ear has often been assimilated to a fertile matrix that would come to imbue divine eloquence. The Dogon and the Bambara know an exemplary teaching that reports how the Word of the creator-genius — itself come forth from a mouth that was a kind of primordial sex — became operative, in mythical times, by penetration into another sex, which is precisely the ear. A double sex, androgynous in sum, of which the pinna constituted the male element, and the ear canal, the female element.
Between these two receptacles that are the ear and the vagina, a subtle dialectic of the divine Word and human semen, of understanding and procreation, of wisdom and birth, will then play out in the Dogon tradition. It will not be surprising that other cultures have made of the ear the seat of intelligence — by which is understood that disposition to the intuitive knowledge of others, by the conjoined operation of intellectual, affective and moral sensitivity.
To this sexual analogy are attached many beliefs, traditions and fables. A myth from Dahomey, for example, certifies that Mawu, the Creator, had initially placed the sexual organs of the woman in the place of the ears. Chigemouni, the Mongol Saviour, chose the most perfect virgin on earth, Maya, and impregnated her by penetrating her right ear during her sleep. Everyone knows that Gargantua came into the world by his mother’s ear.
And since we are with the giant of our national mythology, let us note in passing the size of his ears, according to the description given of the “Vilain” — avatar of Gargantua — by the author of Le Chevalier au Lion, popular poem of the 14th century:
Vis qu’il avait la tête grosse,
plus que cheval ni autre bête ;
cheveux mal peignés, le front pelé
et qui avait plus de deux empans de large ;
les oreilles moussues à grandes touffes comme un éléphant,
le sourcil grand et le visage plat,
yeux de chouette et nez de chat…
And Molière, in the voice of Arnolphe in L’École des Femmes, has Chrysalde say, concerning Agnès:
Dans ses simplicités à tout coup je l’admire,
Et parfois elle en dit dont je pâme de rire.
L’autre jour — pourrait-on se le persuader —
Elle était fort en peine et vint me demander
Avec une innocence à nulle autre pareille
Si les enfants qu’on fait se faisaient par l’oreille !
In the Hindu myth celebrated by the Ramayana, the monkey Hanuman, representing the solar hero, after having been swallowed by a sea monster, came out by the right ear. The details of the text strongly suggest that this is the poetic expression of an infantile fantasy of coitus and birth — which accounts for its universality.
Conception by the ear
In the Christian tradition, certain theologians held that the incarnation of Christ resulted from the fecundation of Mary by the verbal message of the annunciatory Angel. This theme, called “of Conception by the ear”, attested as early as the 4th century, gave rise to a whole theological or religious literature. Many artists would represent the Breath, which they most often figure as a dove, penetrating into the ear of the Virgin — let us cite Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Veneziano, Master Bertram, the anonymous sculptor of the portal of the Marienkirche in Würzburg, and many others.
Saint Augustine moreover, Saint Agobard the imperious archbishop of Lyon under Louis the Pious, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, lent their writings to give credit to the poetic metaphor that the Council of Trent had to consider. And the Salzburg Missal still contains a Hymn to the Virgin which consecrates the tradition:
Rejoice, Virgin, Mother of Christ,
Thou who didst conceive by the ear
At the annunciation of Gabriel.
A whole genital metaphor has thus been constituted “around” the ear, which refers to meanings the most spiritual — which sign the docility to the divine will — as to the most libertine, that the expression “to have a flea in the ear” consecrates. Today rather banal, it was already understood, in the 18th century, only in an innocuous sense. And the dictionary of Trévoux, citing nevertheless Racan:
Toute la nuit j’ai la puce à l’oreille ;
Mon mari dort cependant que je veille.
… seems to mistake the barely veiled meaning, when it gives as equivalent: to be wide awake or anxious. It is however clear that this anxiety is not necessarily innocent and that, referring to the images suggested above, it corresponds to a feminine manner of designating amorous itchings. One readily imagines the remedies fit to calm them, that gallant authors and illustrating painters and engravers have proposed.
The pinna, the lobe, and their ornaments
The pinna of the ear, for its part — of which there has hardly been any question hitherto — frequently receives a male connotation and refers to a kind of metaphorical penis, as the Bambara myth presents it to us. It is however the site of other displacements which make of it the substitute now of a feminine membrane, now of the embryonic envelopes. A very learned dictionary in the 18th century would give as the sole definition of the ear lobe: “That place which the ladies have pierced” — which does not lack ambiguity — without however failing to report the customs of the Inca princes, which will be evoked further on.
Moreover, in the 4th century BC, Ctesias, physician at the court of the King of Persia, in his description of the numerous tribes by which North India was reputed to be inhabited, reports that certain peoples have ears so long that they cover the arms down to the elbows. And Megasthenes, ambassador to the King of Babylon Seleucus I, who had sojourned at the court of Chandragupta and was held to be well informed, confirmed that the Phanesians had such ears that, to sleep, one served as mattress, the other as blanket.
The piercing of the ear lobe is a strange custom, doubtless as ancient and universal as circumcision, with which it is moreover perhaps not unrelated. A Maghreb expression points up its antiquity: “Since my grandmother had her ear lobes pierced” signifies: since the most distant times. But, far from being kept secret, this operation is, on the contrary, proclaimed by the often sumptuous ornamentation that is its pretext. And Pliny inveighs against the extravagant expenses that the elegant women of his time — and even, in the Orient, the men — devoted to auricular pearls.
A custom that persists with us, as is known, and whose protohistory confirms the existence at least since the first Bronze Age, and probably much earlier. From the 4th millennium, in any case, ear ornaments are attested — sometimes a simple bronze wire, sometimes a piece of flat sheet metal equipped with a closing hook, sometimes a rolled-up sheet of bronze, both kinds incidentally extended by jingling pendants.
Servitude or nobility
Is it to this usage — which may originally have been a sign of alienation or of allegiance — that Isaiah refers: “Thine ears shall hear these words sounding behind thee”, as some exegetes propose? There would not necessarily be incompatibility in the dual sense one finds attached to the piercing of the ears: of servitude, as among the Hebrews and the Romans; of nobility and freedom, as among the Athenians, the Indians of the Orient and the Incas for example.
The irreverent French proverb — “Woman without an earring, donkey without a muzzle” —, as well as the practice, in ancient Rome, of attaching one’s slave by the ear by means of an awl to the door of one’s house, refer clearly to the first case. The sumptuous ear ornaments that in the 16th century the Queen of Calicut wore — and which, a witness reports, “hung down to her breasts and even lower” —; those of the Incas and other Indians of South America, so remarkable that they served the Spaniards to designate these very peoples — orejones.
However, despite all this fantasmatic richness we have recognised in it, the ear, oddly, seems to intervene as such only rarely in dreams — much more rarely, in any case, than in the games of lovers. And the pleasure of nibbling seems as widespread in one sex as in the other. It is that the ear is, as anthropology seems to confirm, an essentially bisexual organ — metaphorically, of course.
And it is doubtless no accident that the piercing of the ears, to return to it once again, in such great honour among the female sex, should be, in France in 1985 — unless I am mistaken — the only operation on the body still performed by someone totally independent of the health professions: the jeweller, that ennobled cousin of the blacksmith who, for his part, is still vested, in many “traditional” cultures, with the thankless and dreaded functions of surgeon and circumciser.
— Jacques Bril
— Feature published in a French magazine in 1985. Main article by Bernard Montelh, sidebar “The Imaginary of the Ear” by Jacques Bril.