Music, an Indispensable yet Supposedly Superfluous Notion
Article published in the special issue Diapason — 25th Anniversary* (1981), by Dr Alfred Tomatis.*
Alfred Tomatis, otorhinolaryngologist, specialises in the disorders of hearing and language. For years he has been passionate about the ear and the voice. He has invented instruments — the Electronic Ear in particular — to treat disorders of the voice and of hearing. Professor of audio-psycho-phonology at the École d’anthropologie of Paris, he is the providence of great voices in difficulty. He is the author, in particular, of L’Oreille et la Vie*, published by Robert Laffont.*
To say that music is a notion doubtless requires that we should explain ourselves on the meaning of this term. In our view, it is more than that — much more than that. And perhaps we may, at the end of this account, glimpse its true nature.
For the moment, let us try to understand why it is indispensable to the human being; let us endeavour to know in what way it presides over the realisation of the latter in his highest functions, which are those of language.
It is as a neuro-physiologist specialising in the processes of listening that I shall approach this problem, apologising in advance for the technicality that risks emerging from such a discourse. To me, it seems difficult to speak of music without speaking of the ear and the nervous system. It seems to me impossible to evoke the musical world without insisting on the essential role it is called to play in the structuring of human language.
Man, a receiving-emitting nervous system
Man is a nervous system in his totality. In this he is an exceptional receiver-emitter, and acoustic waves are particularly destined to answer to the needs of the environment to which he is subjected. In the first instance, this neuronal network is built by means of a complex metabolism, while it is moreover organised to ensure a dynamic that testifies to its vitality — this latter being largely based on the contribution of external solicitations and on the responses which result from them. In fact, the mechanisms implicated are more elaborate and more subtle than those stated here in a somewhat lapidary form.
For such a dynamic to be put in place — to which are added at once volition, reflection and all that makes for the vigour of human thought — it is useful that the nervous system receive a significant lot of stimulations. Beyond the perceptions which trigger responses, an activation is necessary to allow the attainment of a level of energetisation capable of sustaining all functions of a psychic order. It is evident that it is difficult to define what this energy really is. Let us say that it is manifested by an increase of vigilance in various intellectual activities, by a particular acuity in concentration, doubled by a sharpened faculty of memory. To be effective, this energetisation requires the presence of “central stations” — the principal of which is the ear.
Vestibule and cochlea: two pathways, one mission
Indeed, the ear alone ensures the greater part of this dynamisation. To achieve this, it operates in two manners themselves dependent on two activities: one vestibular, the other cochlear.
The vestibule has the function of ensuring statics and kinetics, as well as the relative position of each of the limbs or of each of the parts of these latter. It intervenes, for example, in the gestures that govern the position of the fingers. Likewise, it ensures eye movements. In other words, there is not a single muscle of the body that is not under its control, and consequently there does not exist a single movement that can escape its intervention. Every attitude, every posture and every dynamic activity is integrated at the vestibular level, then distributed to the corresponding nervous system — the vestibular, somatic, corporeal integrator.
But this apparatus, particularly sensitive to rhythm, is not qualified to differentiate sounds in their tonal heights, nor in their spectral qualities — in their frequency compositions, in sum. It is thanks to the adjunction of the cochlea that this second stage operates.
The nervous system attached to this ensemble will then integrate all that the labyrinthine vesicle distributes to it. Not only does it benefit from the dynamisation that the sonic message determines, but it also discriminates, with an acuity that grows ever more confirmed, all the movements otherwise memorised, adding to them new movements which are thereby registered on the earlier acquisitions. The mechanisms thus elaborated are particularly interesting to study, in the sense that they allow the understanding of how an image of the body is constructed apart from that elaborated in parallel by touch and by vision.
The neuronal codings that sound determines play a considerable role; and I will venture to affirm that they are more important than those emanating from the other senses, for they are destined to prepare the extremely refined neurological structure that the linguistic construction will later require. Oral language is made of sounds, but it associates with them inflexions, varied modulations, silences, rhythms; so much so that, permanently, cochlea and vestibule intervene to set this dynamic in play — the latter varying from one language to another.
Music as substrate of language
It is the substrate of this essential mechanism, so specific to the human being, that music is called to organise. Certainly one can speak without ever having heard music. But if one applies oneself to analysing such language, one quickly detects certain flaws in it and notices the absence of modulations of a musical order, and consequently of a poetic order. It is true that a long apprenticeship may later allow the compensation of this deficiency and the recovery of a certain musical sense. But why lose time?
It is evident that music alone does not suffice for the integration of language, and many musicians, even musicians of quality, are not always equipped with a particular and refined language. But this observation as a fact would require that one explain what one means by “being a musician”. Likewise, it would be fitting to specify what the word “music” means, in particular on the neuro-psycho-physiological plane.
Why Mozart?
A long experience in the domain of the pedagogy of listening has allowed us to observe that only certain music has the faculty of preparing the body to become the instrument of language. After having experimented with a great number of works both in the domain of classical music and in that of modern, contemporary, folk, and even pop music, we have come to choose electively one composer, and one only: Mozart. I shall not resist the temptation to add “of course”, as if this went without saying. I think that the uninformed expects this conclusion as much as the most experienced.
Why Mozart? For thirty years, I have regularly bent over this question, since we apply daily the effect of Mozartian music to hundreds of subjects under education, and that in all corners of the world, without distinction of cultures, milieus or races. Its effectiveness far exceeds what we can observe both with the musicians who preceded him — like J.-S. Bach, for example — and with his contemporaries or successors. This may seem strange. Is not Mozart’s musical expression indeed the reflection of his century, of his milieu? Indeed yes. But the vast range that he touched — or rather that touched him — leads us deliberately to distinguish him from all other musicians by the indelible imprint he has left in each of his compositions.
In all his output, from his first works to those of his adult years, he remains the freshest, the most serene, the youngest of composers. And it is perhaps to this essential faculty of youth that we must attach the specific quality that characterises his musical expression.
A prodigy without precedent, he had — from his uterine life, through a maternal pregnancy steeped in music — coded his nervous system on physiological rhythms, true, universal, cosmic, I dare say; and which permitted him to adjust his bodily instrument to the modulations he experienced during this exceptional period. His rhythm will remain that one, even as he begins to speak, to create, to compose his first works from the age of five.
This initial imprint has made of Mozart what he is, a being out of the common in all dimensions when it is a question of music. He will use this language to express himself — or rather to express what he receives from elsewhere, what he feels in the deepest part of himself. And it is this incomparable musical language that we pass through in our techniques under various forms, recalling either foetal listening, or the moment of birth — what we call sonic birth — or the prelinguistic period. In the course of this, we also use other musical materials, in particular Gregorian chant, associated with nursery rhymes for small children and with folk songs for adolescents and adults.
Mozart, Gregorian chant, nursery rhymes: a sonic programme
When Mozartian music has ensured awakening, creativity, the cortical charge, motivation, we introduce with Gregorian chant more soothing rhythms, but no less tonifying for that. In fact, we work with certain Gregorian chants, and more particularly with a few elective pieces chosen for their effectiveness. As for the nursery rhymes and folk songs, based essentially on the ethnic expression and the linguistic structures of the country represented, they bring the modulations, rhythms, cadences, accents which will serve to construct language proper.
Thanks to the very particular composition of these different musical expressions, and thanks to the acoustic treatment we perform using electronic techniques, we permanently favour the perception of high frequencies — that is, those which constitute the most important elements for the cortical charge at the level of the cochlea. The latter then puts itself in an adequate posture to perceive these sounds, while the vestibule corrects its position, determining by reflex reaction a setting in verticality of the whole body by acting in particular upon the spinal column.
Listening, the faculty which gives rise to dialogue
This dynamic, which induces the body into a posture of rectitude indispensable to the expression of language, supposes of course that the function of listening be perfectly in place. Perhaps it would be well that I explain a little what for me represents this essential function, without which music would have no reason to be. Grafted onto audition — whether the latter be good or defective — it allows the apprehension of certain sounds, in particular those of language, the selection of them, the decoding of them, with a view to information and under the effect of an attentive will expressed in the form of consciousness. Listening is this determining faculty which gives rise to dialogue, sharing, the communication of the being with himself and with his environment. It is this will to go towards the other, through a self-monitoring that requires the setting in place of quite particular neurological circuits.
Music plays a predominant role in the very foundation of these neuronal conditionings on which the whole of language will later be structured. It constitutes a true preparation for the body and the nervous system, thanks to the charge of stimulations it knows how to bring — not only by itself, but through the play of postural counter-reactions it triggers thanks to the intervention of the cochleo-vestibular system.
The body thus prepared to accede to true dialogue will have at its disposal cybernetic circuits translating the setting in place of a dynamic hierarchisation of the two cerebral hemispheres: the left realising the functions, and the right ensuring the monitorings. It seems to us necessary to mention here the importance of this cortical organisation in which music participates as a structuring element destined to set up the processes of high-level lateralisation.
Music, modulation of the spirit
The role that music — a certain music, I would say — can play in the humanisation of a being, and quite especially in his journey towards the linguistic function, allows us to glimpse the essential aspect of its intervention on the plane of the education of the child and of the adult. Thanks to music, man becomes an antenna to the sound which causes him to enter into resonance. He is the postural fruit of his language which sculpts him.
Thus, man appears as a dynamic neurological system upon which trains of waves break, carried by the primary modulations. These, true modulations of the spirit in movement, are all the more indispensable in that they form the warp of all thought in its formulation. Is it not here that we find what music contains of the essential — in giving rise at once to the movement of the spirit and to that of memory, thanks to the subtle play of a time measured in cadence, divided into a tonal mosaic and as fluid as thought itself.
— Pr Alfred A. Tomatis, in Diapason — 25th Anniversary* (special issue, 1981).*