Basic Principle of the Functioning of the Electronic Ear

It all began, thirty years ago, with the juxtaposition of two series of observations. As an otorhinolaryngologist and son of a singer, Alfred Tomatis had to treat artists whose voices had broken. But at the same period, he was directing the Acoustics Laboratory of the Aeronautical Arsenals. There he examined people whose hearing had been damaged while working on the test benches of supersonic jet engines, in order to know whether they were to be compensated; and, simultaneously, he often noticed a very clear deformation of the voice.

He asked himself whether the damaged audition was not, in the end, the cause of the disturbances of the voice — even in the case of singers. Indeed, a great tenor rises to 110 dB,

120 dB, and even 130 dB: which gives approximately 150 dB in the skull. Now, an ATAR jet engine, on the ground, produces 132 dB: there is not the same energy, but there is the same output intensity.

Deepening his observations, Alfred Tomatis was struck by the parallelism that exists between the audiometric examination of a subject and the envelope curve of the spectral analysis of his voice. He then started a series of experiments bearing on the reactions and counter-reactions of audition upon vocal emission.

He used to this end two arrangements:

• One enabling the visualisation of the harmonic decomposition of the emitted sounds (spectral analysis) through a microphone and an analyser.

• The other giving the possibility of modifying at will the audition of the subject submitted to the experiment; his voice being captured by a second microphone followed by an amplifier whose response characteristics at the level of the earphones worn by the subject are modifiable thanks to a set of filters (high-pass / low-pass / band-pass), thereby allowing variation of the subject’s manner of hearing and consequently of his way of monitoring himself.

The extraordinary importance of the counter-reactions that then arise allows Alfred Tomatis to affirm that there exists a true closed circuit of self-information whose monitoring receptor, during emission at the level of the phonatory organs, is none other than the ear, and that any modification imposed upon this receptor instantaneously brings about a considerable modification of the vocal gesture, easy to detect visually, auditorily, in any case physically monitorable on the cathode-ray tube of the analyser.

Thus, being assured that a mode of vocalic expression proper to a conditioning of the whole phonatory apparatus, externalising itself by a known vocal gesture, answers to a way of hearing determined by a more or less complex conditioning of the whole auditory apparatus; being assured moreover that any modification of this way of hearing engenders a new phonatory gesture, Alfred Tomatis then tries to transform the defective conditioning by a new conditioning calculated on the basis of an ideal auditory response curve (that of a great professional voice user, for instance). From the first sessions, it is observed that there subsists a temporary persistence of this new state, and at the end of a certain training period, it becomes permanent.

To realise this process practically, Alfred Tomatis developed an apparatus which would later be called the Electronic Ear with Tomatis Effect.

The four fundamental Alfred Tomatis laws

Raoul HUSSON, taking up this experimentation in 1957 at the Laboratory of Physiology of the Functions of the Sorbonne, fully confirms it, and groups this ensemble of audio-phonatory counter-reactions under the designation of Tomatis effect.

The latter is defined by four laws:

• The voice contains only what the ear hears.

• If one restores to the traumatised ear the possibility of correct audition of the poorly heard frequencies, these are re-established in the phonatory emission, instantaneously and without the subject’s awareness. Then by generalising this audio-phonatory relation to the case of normal ears

• .

• The ear transmits to the phonatory device the modifications of audition imposed upon it artificially.

Alfred Tomatis having then asked himself how the ear could preserve the benefit of this exercise and improve progressively, he reaches the fourth law.

• Forced audition, alternately maintained and suppressed, succeeds in modifying audition and phonation in a permanent manner.

The Electronic Ear and its mode of action

This apparatus is an electronic complex comprising amplifiers, filters and an electronic gating system. It may be used in two situations:

1. The information transmitted by the tape recorder passes through the Electronic Ear before reaching the subject’s ears through two earphones (purely auditory training).

2. The information transmitted by the tape recorder is perceived and reproduced by the subject during the sonic blanks distributed on the magnetic tape: almost simultaneously, the pupil’s voice is captured by a microphone, monitored and modified by the Electronic Ear (audio-vocal training).

The Electronic Ear acts by modelling the information within a determined pass band, in order to suppress the scotomata (falls of the listening curve for certain frequencies), and to give to this curve the progression necessary (ascending slope) for a perception and an analysis of maximum quality.

In addition, it offers the sonic message two possible pathways towards the terminal earphones: the first channel corresponds to the placing under tension of the tympanum and of the muscles of the malleus and stapes; the second rather entails their relaxation. A simple adjustment then suffices to pass the information alternately from one channel to the other, and thus to provoke a continual movement of tension and relaxation of the adaptive muscular mechanisms of the middle ear.

This micro-gymnastics entails a phenomenon of persistence which creates a progressive and permanent muscular conditioning. The middle ear thus becomes capable of accomplishing by itself, spontaneously and correctly, the regulations necessary for the transmission of sounds.

These different functions are ensured by three electronic “blocks”:

1. The filters, distributed over two stages, form the two channels and modulate the passage of frequencies (one of them may, for instance, give preferential passage to high frequencies, and the other to low frequencies).

2. The gate: it regulates the successive comings and goings from one channel to the other. It is a sort of door which opens and closes according to the variations of intensity of the sonic message.

3. The balance: to prepare the right ear to become the directing ear, the ratio of sonic intensities corresponding to the two earphones is progressively differentiated by the reduction of intensity on the left.

As for the sonic information proper, it consists of an ensemble of magnetic tapes recorded in the laboratory, whose order of diffusion is determined by the programme conceived in function of the case treated: it is essentially music and human voice possibly electronically processed, that is to say more or less filtered by the reduction of the intensity of low frequencies.

The programming of the sonic materials

The programme is itself established according to the standards of the audio-psycho-phonological discipline. Its aim is to have the patient travel the ideal sonic path he should have followed since his conception, since it is on it that the quality of his listening — and consequently his faculties of oral and written expression — depend.

From the carnal communication of the foetus with the maternal uterus to the most fecund verbal exchanges, the trail is long and strewn with pitfalls, for at each period of his evolution, the subject’s relation with his environment may be disturbed, deficient, or even outright severed.

And the method consists, drawing upon the fact that a communication already exists between the foetus and the mother, in giving rise in the subject to the desire that this communication be prolonged after birth, with the mother first, then with the father, and finally with the whole of society.

The itinerary begins in the intra-uterine “dialogue” (a dialogue which, in fact, may itself be threadbare, which will compel the practitioner to take everything back to zero) and ends with the subject’s insertion in the social context (an insertion which, in turn, is at the origin of another, much more personal, journey).

The ear is therefore replunged into the conditions of a very distant experience, the most ancient that it was able to perceive. But at that period, the foetus’s listening is characterised by the fact that it exercises itself in an aquatic milieu, since the foetus itself is plunged in the amniotic fluid. The sonic information (filtered sounds) is therefore obtained by passing the sound through electronic filters, which artificially produce an audition similar to that obtained through layers of water.

In general, the maternal voice is used to this end, for it is one of the principal “noises” perceived by the embryo. The subject’s mother is invited to read for half an hour a text liable to please her: she is then recorded under conditions allowing — with a view to filtering — the conservation of the high frequencies.

When the maternal voice is not available (divorce, death, or too poor sonic quality…), recourse is had to filtered music. Experience has shown that musical themes are all the more effective for being rich in high frequencies and close to Mozartian rhythms or Gregorian chants.

After a certain number of sessions of filtered sounds, sonic birth is performed — that is, the subject passes from audition in an aquatic milieu to audition in an aerial milieu. To this end, in the course of a session, the filtering may pass from 8,000 Hz to 100 Hz. The repercussions of this phase are generally profound: it gives the subject the possibility of living a crucial moment of his existence, in the course of which he ought truly to have been born into the world.

After sonic birth, the active phase begins, in which the subject prepares to meet “the other” (the social universe); the first structures of language are placed there.

Then the subject is led to meet himself, that is, to accept himself. The sonic material then helps him to develop his language; his self-monitorings are reinforced and guarantee him a good adaptation to his own realities and to the conditions of existence imposed by his environment.

Intra-uterine listening

Two questions allow an approach to the problem of language:

How does man manage to produce articulated sounds?

Why does he feel the need to produce them?

The first of these questions has reason to surprise, for it seems evident that the human being speaks because he is endowed with an apparatus expressly destined to fulfil this function. In fact, this affirmation is false, for there exists no organ physiologically preconceived for this purpose, and speech has used the existent to build itself: a first ensemble made of a part of the digestive apparatus — the lips, mouth, soft palate, tongue, teeth — and a second issuing from the respiratory apparatus — the larynx, nasal cavities, lungs, diaphragm, rib cage. Thus, to put itself at the service of speech, the larynx turned away from its first function. It freed itself. And this liberation coincided with that of the ear, initially destined to locate sounds, but which set about analysing them.

As for the second question, Alfred Tomatis affirms that what counts is not being able to speak, but wanting to; for the ape, from a purely physiological standpoint, could speak too, and yet does not do so.

At the origin of language, there must exist a desire, which can only be that of communicating with another — the search for a known situation, even lived, even regretted, in the course of which was revealed the profound notion of pooling, from which emerges the first becoming-aware of relation.

But how is this impulse born?

It is on the basis of observations by an English zoologist that Alfred Tomatis elaborates his response. This author had noticed that if eggs of songbirds were brooded by non-songbirds, the birds of that clutch did not sing. Better still, if the eggs were brooded by birds that sing but in another way, the young had every chance of “getting the song wrong” after hatching.

It thus seems that an audio-vocal conditioning is possible already at the egg stage.

And what if it were so for the human kind?

Experiments conducted on infants by other researchers showed Alfred Tomatis that he was on the right track: “the mother makes her child, gives him a nest in herself, nourishes him, prepares him for life by a dialogue made of all the contacts she can have with him. Sonic communication is the principal one, for the mother reveals herself to the foetus through all her organic, visceral noises, and above all through her voice.”

The child draws all the affective substance from this speaking voice…

He is imbued, impregnated by it, and thus integrates the support of his mother tongue.

It is indeed the first audio-vocal communication, in which the embryo, when all goes well, draws a feeling of security which contributes to his flourishing.

The desire to communicate is then nothing other than the desire not to rupture — or eventually to renew — a relation (acoustic) as satisfying with another.

But if the foetus hears, it is certainly not in the same manner as we do. From birth to maturity, the “opening” of the ear is progressive; and birth itself brings a fundamental modification in listening, for the ear, adapted to the liquid milieu of intra-uterine life, must suddenly accommodate itself to an aerial milieu.

Before birth, the three parts of the ear — outer, middle, inner — are acoustically adapted to the same frequencies; these are practically those of water, and they lie beyond 8,000 Hz. At birth, one witnesses a true sonic birth. The first two stages of the infant’s ear will have to adapt to the impedances of the surrounding air, while the third stage (the inner ear) keeps its liquid milieu.

But the first days after birth leave the child in a state of transition on the plane of sonic life. Indeed, the middle ear — and in particular the Eustachian tube — retains amniotic fluid for ten days, so that the two stages, middle and inner, remain tuned to the frequencies of the liquid milieu. After the tenth day, everything dims, for the Eustachian tube empties of its liquid substance, and the infant loses his perception of high frequencies — he hardly hears any longer.

He will have to, for weeks, in the course of a long apprenticeship, seek to increase the accommodation power of his ear by working the tympanic tension, in order to find again little by little, through the surrounding air, the contact he had once with that voice which lulled him in the depths of his uterine universe.

Faced with psychological disorders whose origin is incontestably situated at the level of the first stages of an individual’s life (intra-uterine period, birth, first relations with the mother…), Alfred Tomatis then has the idea of having the affected subject relive this period sonically. He obtains, by simple acoustic information, profound, extremely intense psychological reactions, and the cessation of certain symptoms.

By sound, it became possible to renew the primordial relation, to have one relive birth — with all the deconditioning aspect such an experience can contain — and to potentiate the desire to communicate with the environment, without which there is no psychological balance; a kind of “resetting to zero” of the individual, followed by a reconstruction of his deep personality, but this time effected in full consciousness.

In this process, the immense advantage of the sonic pathway is that the auditory nerve will reach corticality directly, without passing through the central part of the thalamus (the sensory centre of the primitive brain — a central, subcortical nervous mass which acts as a kind of filter where the various sensations are coordinated, interpreted and appreciated before being transmitted to consciousness/the cortex), whereas all other sensitive information passes through this channel. If the thalamus has a “resistance or viscosity” too great, blocked by an affectivity perturbed by even crossed traumas, this region will each time reawaken by impulse the initial trauma(s). Whereas by attacking the cortex directly by the auditory pathway, the cortex may in a way counter-react upon the thalamus; and it is by this inverse effect that the cortex, increasing its conscious field, takes up the painful difficulties. So that under these conditions, the subject can take charge of himself; he then “heals” himself by his own action, leaving his somatisation to enter into a true dialogue with himself.

Cortical recharge

The infant’s behaviour can also bring to light an essential function of the ear, widely used by audio-psycho-phonological training (A.P.P.).

Before the tenth day, the little child is tonic and very dynamic, but following the emptying of his middle ear, he enters a markedly calmer phase, since he loses his power to capture high-frequency sounds. For before being an organ destined to hear, the ear has the function of recharging the cortex with electrical potential.

On the one hand, it verticalises the being and thus ensures its own maximal energy output; on the other, the sound correctly received is transformed into nervous impulse at the level of the ciliated cells (cells of Corti) of the cochleo-vestibular apparatus (inner ear).

The energetic charter of these nervous impulses thus reaches the cortex, which then distributes it throughout the body with a view to the tonification and dynamisation of the being.

But not all sounds are apt to provoke this effect of charging. On the basilar membrane, the cells of Corti are much denser in the part reserved for high frequencies than in that where the low frequencies distribute themselves. So that the transmission to the cortex of the captured energy is much more intense when it comes from the high zone than when it emanates from the range reserved for the low. The high frequencies will thus furnish more nervous impulses and provoke a more important recharge effect. Alfred Tomatis moreover calls sounds rich in high harmonics “charging sounds”, as opposed to low or “discharging” sounds. The latter do not bring enough energy to the cortex and end up even by exhausting the individual, since they entail bodily motor responses through their vestibular action (semicircular canals, utricle) which themselves absorb more energy than the labyrinth furnishes.

The ear is therefore the source of our vitality and dynamism, since it contributes to the awakening of our cerebral machinery. It is, in the end, what gives us the strength to overcome aggressions, the resistance to effort, and the energy which erases fatigue. By its harmonious functioning, it motivates and propels the individual into a dynamic of life in which it becomes easy to take charge of oneself and to attain a real autonomy, to manifest an unshakeable will, a great sense of responsibility, a lively sense of decision and a constant underlying joy. The simple observation of a depressive (whose “batteries” are so flat without possibility of recharge) is the best negative illustration of this picture. Audio-psycho-phonological training can teach him again to tense his tympanic membranes correctly in order to be once again capable of receiving high-frequency sounds. Moreover, this apprenticeship has a direct consequence upon the life of our organs.

Neurovegetative equilibrium

The pneumogastric nerve, or X^th cranial pair, or Vagus nerve according to the ancient designation, spreads its sole sensory antenna over the external face of the tympanic membrane.

Its presence is primordial, for it is one of the nerves that regulate the mechanisms of the ear in function of the “humours” or moods of the subject; and as much as it knows how to obey the psyche, so much does it know how to bend the latter to its own reactions. In its intimacy between being and body, in the interlocking of its multiple interferences which so judiciously earn it the designation of Vagus nerve, it is master of the vegetative, visceral pathway.

Its neuronal area is immense: it touches the tympanum, the pharynx, the larynx, the lungs, the heart, the stomach, the liver (gallbladder), the spleen, the kidneys, the pancreas, the small intestine, the colon, the rectum, the anus…

Thanks to it, everything may organise itself harmoniously or, on the contrary, become unbalanced; in this last case there appears the train of various somatisations: stage fright, anxiety, anguish, bulimias, anorexias, angina pectoris, asthmas, otitis, rhinitis… The ear may play a particularly harmful role in this picture; for this, it suffices that it close itself, that is, that it relax the musculature of the malleus, and that it not solicit that of the stapes. Sounds are then transmitted only in a very partial way, and those that are transmitted cannot be analysed; moreover, only the low frequencies have any chance of passing, drawing the completely relaxed tympanic membrane into a too-ample movement, which in its turn excites the auricular branch of the Vagus, with all the reactions this entails in the vegetative sphere.

It has been seen that training has as its aim to teach the subject anew to tense his tympanum and to place himself in a posture of listening to high frequencies. Then, the excitation of the pneumogastric ceases and its appeasement floods the visceral world. The subject feels arising in himself an impression of well-being and liberation, the content of which is hard to delimit, but he clearly realises that he is henceforth more sure of himself and of his possibilities. Respiration deepens, anxiety and muscular contractures disappear, global relaxation flowers.

Verticality and the listening posture

The ear also ensures, thanks to its semicircular canals, a function of equilibration which determines our postural attitudes. This is an important role, for it is certainly impossible to give an individual access to the information of his environment, and to communication, without ensuring him a correct position.

The plenitude of listening can only be attained in the vertical, for to lend the ear is also to tense the body to this listening, in order to offer to this information the sensitive zones of our cutaneous covering. There is then established a feedback: listening improves and transforms the attitude, while the latter allows, in turn, listening to perfect itself thanks to the message that begins to reach it in an ever more faithful manner.

It is the auditory and bodily actions, reactions and counter-reactions which hold, in their mechanisms, the major keys to verticality, since the inner ear needs to centralise the postural motor information in order to obtain the optimum yield of the energetic transformations that operate at its level — as well as at the level of the skin, so rich in sensory corpuscles on its anterior face, and of the muscles and tendons which contain the Golgi corpuscles submitted to gravitational excitation.

This is a function the inner ear fulfils efficiently, given its belonging to a very complex neurological block which encompasses the labyrinth, the cerebellum, the cortex and the body; it therefore holds under its sway all the motor muscles of the body and coordinates its motor function — an essential element in the becoming-aware of the body by the cortex.

It is moreover easy to provoke postural changes experimentally as a function of certain modifications of listening. They immediately introduce a sensible difference in bodily attitude. By imposing an audition rich in high frequencies, one observes immediately, at the moment when the subject’s phonation comes alive, a striking postural correlation: the spinal column straightens, the rib cage opens, the subject unconsciously seeks a better dorsal rectitude by a rotation of the pelvis forward, the face relaxes and is mobilised in a harmonious way, the voice lights up. Against the previous trial, a curve opposite to the first (entailing therefore a listening richer in low frequencies) will entail a postural modification playing in the inverse sense on all the aforementioned parameters.

Training moreover includes the learning of an attitude called “listening posture” which gives the subject a maximum opening — that is, the extreme development of his possibilities of emission of a sonic message under good conditions, and also of correct reception of information coming from the environment.

The ear thus placed can then, as has been said, receive the high frequencies and block the low.

It must be recalled also that the energetic consumption relating to our postural maintenance in a period of activity is minimal when the body is in equilibrium, upright and vertical.

The directing right ear and laterality

“One must be right-handed to the very left”, Alfred Tomatis likes to repeat.

For the interest of an individual, in the combat he wages for his adaptation to the world, is to be right-handed not only of the hand and foot, but of audition, of speech and of thought.

The attentive observation of the auditory curves of a singer shows that the monitoring he exercises on his voice through his ears is not of the same quality on the right as on the left.

By a sonic dazzlement, or by injecting noise, it is easy to make a singer in activity lose the monitoring of his left audition. The observer then notes that he sings just as well, and even better, than before!

By contrast, if the right ear is suppressed, the subject immediately experiences great difficulties in mastering his voice.

Alfred Tomatis had occasion to repeat this experiment with instrumentalists and actors; it was verified every time. Manifestly, there therefore exists a directing ear, which is always the right.

And if the two ears serve to locate sounds — since auditory bilaterality favours angulation — it seems indeed that one cannot accede to the profound mastery of language except by choosing the right ear as the antenna of capture of the verbal flow; the left ear gives a global panorama of the sonic environment, the right can aim at a precise sound and analyse it finely.

Why this asymmetry? Because the impulses that depart from the brain can only have their repercussions, for the production of a sound, at the level of the larynx, of which the human being has made his privileged instrument of communication. Now, at this level, there is asymmetry: the right hemilarynx benefits from a motor recurrent nerve (it is a branch of the pneumogastric) much shorter than its collateral; for the right recurrent moves towards the right wall of the larynx after having crossed below the right subclavian artery, while the left recurrent plunges into the thorax and forms a loop beneath the aorta before rejoining the left lateral side of the larynx.

Consequently, the time of the neuronal impulses is different; in the self-monitoring circuit which links the larynx to the ear, the right ear is therefore closer to the phonatory organs and to the information than the left.

Classically, the human body is “cut” in two, with a dominant right side, served by a left brain considered as the major one — without one realising that the right side cannot do anything without the left. The two sides are inter-useful, and the ideal balance, for a human being, is the functional harmonisation of right and left.

It is wrongly believed that all the nervous fibres are crossed, that the left-right (or right-left) relationship is the only one possible; thus, at the level of the “primary” ear (the two utricles and the semicircular canals) the bundles are not even crossed at all: the right side innervates the right side of the spinal cord, for instance. It is only afterwards that the two primitive nerves will give crossed bundles.

In fact, only three fifths of the nervous bundles are crossed, against two fifths which are direct.

There is therefore no major cerebral hemisphere, and each of them has its own activity: the right brain has a function of monitoring and integration; the left is rather the executor.

Thereby, contrary to what is generally affirmed, motor function is essentially governed by the left brain (even if it is the left arm that one moves); by contrast, the right brain exercises its monitoring as much over the right as over the left. But for this, the information must be received by the right ear, for if it is received by the left ear, it is the right brain that must take charge of execution, and in doing so, it can no longer exercise its monitoring function fittingly.

It is evident that a great number of subjects manage to adapt to a poor lateralisation, and even to show much brilliance in their intellectual or other activities. But this costs them a certain effort, and as well as they may pull through, they would be much more masters of their means if they heard on the other side.

Thus, in training, one lateralises progressively and systematically to the right, and one observes almost always that in making a subject pass from left listening to right listening, he improves much his cerebral yield, for each hemisphere is replaced in its proper role; and it is then that one obtains the integration of sensori-motor and audio-phonatory lateralities — the whole internal structure of the being harmonising itself.

But if this laterality depends on a choice, why do some subjects choose precisely the most unfavourable self-monitoring circuit?

It must be specified that the choice is unconscious and is linked to the elaboration of the subject’s language.

Schematically, the child already communicates with its mother; at this babbling stage, there is not yet a real differentiation of the ears, for the good reason that the infant has no need yet to prick up its ear in order to aim sounds precisely.

The syllables are therefore repeated twice (ma-ma / pa-pa / etc.) since each ear sends an impulse to each hemilarynx, the left impulse having a slight delay relative to the right given the difference in length of the neuronal circuits.

Next the child will meet the father who is the vector of socialised language. To understand him and to integrate this language — which is for the child his first foreign language — he will have to prick up the correct ear. Thanks to it, the response will be immediate and precise, and the words will acquire all their semantic charge.

But if the relations between the father and the child are defective, the latter has every chance of choosing the left ear, for it allows him to set the interlocutor at a distance and to protect himself from him.

Then, the verbal flow is no longer very well monitored, and the structuring of the subject’s language may be compromised, with the harmful consequences this entails at the level of the learning of writing, and of the integration of grammar.

Thus, any deficiency of this right auditory self-monitoring almost obligatorily entails disorders of oral and written expression, and therefore diminishes communicability; at the limit, the study of another modern language or of singing becomes troublesome, if not impossible.

Simultaneously, one notes a very clear drop in the yield of the faculties of memorisation, attention and concentration.

It is interesting to note that if one constrains a left-hander to pass to the right, he generally refuses both sides, and effects a regression whose most frequent consequence is the return to the language destined for the mother (before the “choice”), and therefore to stammering.

The image of the body

This is an essential notion, and generally rather poorly defined.

The human being is above all a nervous system covered with a somatic sheath, and the image of the body for man is the use of his neuronal field — a use that varies according to individuals and to the accidental factors that distinguish them from one another; it is also the image or “integrated concept” each makes of himself.

This image is most often very different from what a perfectly objective image would be, and its importance resides in the fact that our appearance, our posture and our behaviour are directly dependent upon it.

In addition, only its correct integration can bring the bodily skill that man needs in the most diverse activities, whether the practice of a sport, of a musical instrument, or even the simple driving of a car. Only the virtuoso possesses his bodily image to such a point that he integrates into it the instrument of his activity and the space in which he moves — he is one with the whole. Thus the Zen Japanese archer is one with his bow and with the target, and the aim is then reached, even with the eyes closed.

How is this image formed?

The air never ceases to move, to be animated by various movements of rotation; every being is thus plunged into a sonic structure which sculpts him, for sound does not address itself only to the ear, it affects the whole body.

The ear, certainly, has become the principal receptor, but it is only a question of the progressive differentiation of a parcel of skin which, originally, was not distinguished from the rest of the cutaneous surface.

Our body is therefore caught in a network of pressures and impulses which excite it at all its points. Little by little, the addition of all these excitations composes an integrated image which, in a way, draws the body in negative.

This play of stimulations may be provoked in different ways, but there exists a privileged, capital means: it is language, for the sound that we produce ourselves also imprints permanently a host of small touches (acoustic “pressures”) on the whole of our peripheral nervous system. In function of the words we use, we shall touch certain parts of our body more or less.

Language gradually sensitises the sensory zones detecting the acoustic waves sustained by the “verbal flow”, the zones most favourable to this sensitive information being situated where the distribution of nervous fibres specialised in measuring pressures is densest (face, anterior face of the thorax, abdomen, palms of the hands, dorsal face of the right hand at the level of the thumb-index pincer, inner side of the lower limbs, soles of the feet).

Moreover, it is certain that it is to offer the greatest surface of these elective regions that verticality becomes an obligation when one wishes to perfectly master one’s speech.

One may deduce an essential principle from this: if the image of the body is the consequence of language, then by improving one’s speech one can remodel one’s body, since, in the last analysis, our appearance and posture too are governed by it…

But it is evident that if we are sculpted by the sound that we emit, we are equally so by the sounds that others emit; then, in this perspective, a dialogue is a certain way that two individuals have of setting each other into vibration; and the quality of their intercommunication depends in the end on the compatibility of their bodily images, itself linked to the coherence of their listening curves: two subjects who present distorted and very dissimilar curves have little chance of being able to get along, for, in the proper sense of the terms, they are no longer on the same wavelengths, their interrelation becomes difficult, even painful. Alfred Tomatis was able to verify this with monks.

Thanks to filters, he imposed upon two subjects identical auditory curves, then launched them into a very thorny discussion: they did not manage to enter into disagreement. Then, he inverted the curves and engaged an anodyne dialogue: a quarter of an hour later, they were quarrelling. Every human being should have for aim to make his bodily image homogeneous with the whole of which it forms part.

Should there be distortion between it and certain objective dispositions of body or mind, and one may be sure that the subject will experience difficulties in his adaptation to the world, and in his adaptation to himself — that is, he will feel ill at ease in a body of which he will scarcely have consciousness, he will not know how to determine his place in the spatio-temporal and social structures; at the limit, motor coordination itself may be deficient.

Obviously, a good image of the body achieves the absolute adherence of the real body and the imagined body: it is the image thanks to which one can be oneself down to the last atom, and engage in a harmonious behavioural dynamic.

Some particular applications

Although we are all more or less concerned by audio-psycho-phonological training, certain human groups or professional categories are so more particularly.

This enumeration is evidently not limiting.

Educators

The term being taken in its most general sense, from the teacher proper to the parents themselves… for the content of the knowledge transmitted does not count alone — the quality of the vector is doubtless also important.

A trainer, a teacher whose voice is poorly placed or defective destroys the listening of the taught subjects, and this all the more in that they are young.

Orators

I am thinking of politicians, of lawyers, of ecclesiastics, for whom a correct voice is primordial.

Any subject whose auditory field is reduced, and whose voice is damaged, cannot hope to convince an interlocutor effectively, for the message destined for him does not get through — either because it is poorly constructed or because its sonic support is of poor quality.

When a man truly wishes to enter into communication with another man, and to act upon him, it is the global living being that comes, like a kind of vivifier, to play on the totality of the other’s psycho-physiology.

The strength of a man is when he is capable of this virtuosity: to play upon himself so perfectly that he can cause the other, or others, to enter into resonance, and thus to orient their intrinsic dynamics.

Singers and Musicians

To know how to sing, or to play an instrument, is essentially to know how to set oneself to the listening of one’s own verbal flow, or of the sound emitted by the instrument, in order better to monitor them.

And experience proves that the improvement, in a subject, of his potential for monitoring through listening allows him to acquire a greater mastery of his voice or of his instrument.

Sportsmen

To excel in a sport, it is evident that complete athletic qualities are necessary, and that one must have a perfect knowledge of the techniques and rules of the chosen sporting discipline.

However, these conditions being fulfilled following the various specific trainings to which the athlete is submitted, it is observed that this is not yet sufficient, for the latter must attain, in addition, a high degree of bodily consciousness — since all sports require a complete engagement of the human being through the mediation of the body.

At the limit, it is not even too strong to affirm that the psychological approach ought to precede the technical approach of the discipline envisaged.

“Certain sports, or certain techniques, go as far as becoming a prolongation of the body — such for instance as tennis, Basque pelota, billiards… The dialogue between the body and the ball determines a deepened knowledge of posture, in an approach perspective destined to mobilise intelligence with a view to playing with the object. It is a question of knowing thoroughly the kinetic properties of a body and of exploiting all its possibilities, in order to satisfy as best as possible the demands of an imposed rule. The learnings call upon human genius for the establishment of rules, on the one hand; for their observance, on the other, in function of the image of the body in face of the object.”

It is easy to conclude that in a sporting competition, with equal technicality and physical form, it is the one who, relative to the other, possesses a better image of the body who carries the victory.

Possessing the broader conscious field, he is the master of possibilities of concentration and self-monitoring which risk failing in his adversary.

The Electronic Ear develops or reinforces precisely the right laterality and allows thus a better and quicker psychomotor self-monitoring; it increases resistance to effort and accelerates the faculty of recovery; it attenuates stage fright, or even anxiety, and frees the subject from affective or visceral impedimenta; the communicability and openness of the subject increase, whence a better integration within a team…

Subjects exposed to noise

For example, workers working in a noisy environment, sound engineers, musicians, or even simply the young who listen to modern music a little too loudly (pop music notably; thus a Swedish survey revealed that in 1970 auditory disorders from sonic aggression were ten times higher in adolescents than in 1956!).

When one plunges an individual into noise (120 dB, 130 dB), immediately, the ear undergoes damage; and if one does not relieve the subject, at the end of a month, the lesion becomes irreversible. But it must however be specified that if an intensity of 120 dB is painful, an intensity of 80 dB sometimes suffices for serious disorders to appear.

Moreover, intensity is not alone in question; the duration of exposure to noise, its frequency, its more or less unexpected character, modify the importance of the damage caused.

Alfred Tomatis observed that when a worker of the Arsenals, of mature age, was assigned to the jet engines, he had generally followed a progression in his exposure to noise. He had had the chance to undergo thereby a kind of auditory training such that he behaved as a true athlete in his spontaneous and automatic defence against noise — that is, he had reinforced and mastered the musculature of his middle ear.

This is exactly what the Electronic Ear procures by its action; it may therefore help a subject to fight effectively against sonic aggression, and to protect himself from it.

This is all the more important in that the action of noise may have unfavourable repercussions not only upon audition, but also upon the functioning of the heart, blood circulation, respiratory rhythm, intestinal transit, hormonal life, vision, the central nervous system, memory, intellectual and mental balance…

The integration of modern languages

An ancient Eastern proverb affirms: “If you possess one language, you have one life; but if you possess two, you have two lives.”

Eternal wisdom of the Ancients. It is not today that we shall belie them, for never has it been so crucial to know several languages.

But we do not all have the same possibilities before this problem that is the integration of a foreign language, for to speak a language is first to adapt one’s own listening to the acoustic frequencies of this language.

Thus, the “gift of tongues” is not so much the gift of speaking them as of hearing them.

It happens that there exist, according to the regions of the globe, different types of audition, different “ears” which correspond approximately to the different languages.

Each of them is characterised by a particular selectivity band, or “pass band”. The French ear, for instance, plays between 1,000 Hz and 2,000 Hz, while the Italian ear is inscribed between 2,000 Hz and 4,000 Hz.

The Russian pass band goes from the lowest sounds to the highest frequencies — which gives them the faculty of easily learning many languages (something long observed).

Conversely, the impossibility of effectively reproducing a foreign language is generally only a form of deafness.

Faced with unaccustomed sonic information, the ear changes its listening posture for another perfectly defined one, different in every respect from that in which the mother tongue had fixed it. And it may well not be capable of accomplishing this work of accommodation.

Fortunately, all is not lost in this case. Thanks to the Electronic Ear, it is possible to unblock the failing ear in order to create artificially this receptivity that it lacks. This apparatus allows the tightening or spreading at will of the pass band, and gives the subject thus the English ear, the Spanish ear.

By modifying the audition of the subject, by teaching him to hear in another way than that to which he is accustomed by his mother tongue, one triggers another way of speaking, another mode of expression characteristic of the language to be studied. This audio-vocal effect entails modifications bearing on timbre, on the organisation of the phonatory apparatus, on the use of the resonance cavities, on laryngeal tonus, on respiration, on facial expression — so many modifications which react in chain by reflex ignition extending step by step to the whole morphological structure of the subject, to the point of allowing him to express himself, to think, and even to exist through this new language.

The Electronic Ear allows this in-depth assimilation. But before starting the learning of a foreign language, it is well to perform an auditory assessment, for if, for all sorts of reasons, it proves that one is deaf, for example, to frequencies above 2,000 Hz, it is useless to wish to learn English, whose pass band is situated clearly above. Under these conditions, it will never be correctly assimilated; one must first “open” the ear.

Managers

If there is a category of persons that must reunite the essential of what has been said previously, it is indeed that of managers, senior executives, “decision-makers”, negotiators.

These persons need all the human qualities pushed to their maximum development, both at the physical and the mental level; but they need above all an impeccable, supple nervous machinery, rapid in its responses.

In an ageing corticality, the nervous processes sclerotise, memory no longer integrates very well, concentration dilutes, novel connections grow further apart, then disappear.

Now, what we most need is creators who, alone, will know how to find the new ways called for by the considerable problems with which we are confronted.

We have seen that the Electronic Ear, by its direct action on the cortex, by this massive contribution of immediately usable energy, lights up consciousness and stimulates creativity.

It is the “awakening” tool par excellence.

In addition, the harmonisation and coherence of listening curves is one of the determining elements in the formation of stable, high-yield teams, for exchanges there are numerous, relaxed and fruitful.

Conclusion

The ear thus appears as a major organ playing the role of a link between consciousness and the person, and between the latter and his environment.

A major organ also in the construction and translation of thought, since it ensures its journey by means of a well-placed, well-timbred and harmoniously modulated voice, which remains the foundation of every human communication.

Freed from the grip of the past and of ancient inhibitions by an effective neuronal deconditioning, the being participates fully in the activities that give him the notion of existing; his perception has become considerably refined, and his integration is such that he no longer feels solutions of continuity between his cortex and the universe surrounding him.

His anchoring in reality is solid, and he passes easily from the listening of his “inner world” to the listening of the world in which he bathes, no longer clinging to sclerotic and outdated scales of values. His plasticity and his capacity for adaptation are maximal; he knows how continually to put in question old values in order to apprehend others more true or more in accord with present times. These faculties are essential in our world in perpetual evolution, which demands frequent re-examinations.

The Electronic Ear entails a maturation of the being by addressing itself directly to the cerebral structures, and according to a programme founded on the very laws of human development.

It seems necessary to insist on the fact that the Electronic Ear in no way aims to condition the subject artificially. It is not a machine for shaping ears and brains in function of an arbitrary model. It is on the contrary an instrument liable to help the individual traumatised, frustrated, maladapted or blocked by some incident of his history to recover, through the full opening — that is, the full liberation — of his auditory perceptions, the positive liberty of his nature, the active liberty of his destiny. It is indeed a liberating process which associates a preliminary deconditioning with a reconditioning effected according to ideal standards.

Its field of action is therefore immense, from the return to equilibrium of greatly disturbed human beings, to the extreme development of the capacities of persons already endowed with a good natural balance.

In this respect, the Electronic Ear may be used massively for adult retraining, to give rise to the awakening of their often dormant cortical activity, for many adults remain, at bottom, “dyslexics” who are unaware of it — they are distracted and their power of concentration is weak, they hardly have any memory, they read in a superficial and poorly integrated manner, they wear their bodies like poorly adjusted and cumbersome clothes, they are easily tired, without tone, depressive…

The Electronic Ear can, even to the adult of a certain age, restore his full possibilities of adaptation, and have him recover his vitality, his desire to be reborn and to communicate with new social and professional environments.