Finding One's Voice — Alfred Tomatis

Article published in the magazine Psychologie in 1982, by Catherine Dreyfus.

The voice is the reflection of our personality. In the light of this observation, numerous psychotherapists have their patients work on the vocal organs to recover the ideal timbre, the sound that pleases. Logical conclusion: when one is well in one’s voice, one feels well in one’s being — and vice versa.

For some ten minutes, the most surprising sounds have been issuing from the slim, dark-haired and curly young woman who, before me, sways and turns like an animal on the trail of an enticing scent: growls of a wild beast on the track, sirens’ songs, sparrow’s chirps, cats’ moans on the path of love, soprano or baritone chords… She passes from low to high, from ferocious energy to extreme softness, with disconcerting ease, interrupting it all with hoarse and broken moans like sobs. It is enough to send shivers down your spine.

Margaret Pikes dares to go to the very end of herself. Nothing of her voice is foreign to her. She has been working on it for more than fifteen years: she can extract from it practically anything she wishes. No note, no cry, no emotion frightens her. Margaret belongs to the Roy Hart Theatre, a theatrical community based in the Cévennes, for whom the sound of the voice, even independently of words, is the instrument of expression par excellence.

She is part of the growing number of researchers, therapists and artists who explore this tool. They see in it, through a play on words that owes nothing to chance, a royal path to the discovery of oneself. To work on one’s voice, they hold, is the surest way to ensure one’s personal development to the maximum. It is one of the most rewarding ways to attain it.

Nothing more personal than a voice. Nothing more revealing. With eyes closed, one recognises those who are dear to us. One senses the state they are in. “You have a good voice today!” Or: “Hey, what is happening to you, you have a funny voice?” But we also react instinctively, most often without knowing it, to the voice of most of our interlocutors. A timbre, an intonation can transform an encounter into disaster or into love at first sight, into lightning negotiation or fiasco. There are voices so unbearable that one no longer even hears their owner say: “Pass me the salt!” Others so seductive that one remains in spite of oneself under the charm. Voices so hesitant, so inaudible, that they call forth aggression, catastrophe. Others so forced that they break and hurt. Others so poised that they impose by themselves respect. The effect is all the more profound and brutal in that it generally remains unconscious.

Now playing with the voice — that is something one can learn. Nothing in this domain is fatal: the worst handicap is surmountable. As Louis-Jacques Rondeleux, professor of singing and diction at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique in Paris, says: “The voice is like a musical instrument. The quality of the sound one draws from it depends as much on the instrument as on the musician — and still more, perhaps, on the way one uses it.”

The technique, indispensable, is only a matter of gymnastics. Once learned or rediscovered, it becomes as simple as walking. The difficulty is to take charge of oneself, to allow the voice to say what one is. To offer oneself the pleasure, to take the risk, through it, of expressing oneself — and sometimes even of discovering oneself.

To emit a sound, one must make the vocal cords “vibrate” by projecting upon them, on expiration, the air contained in the glottis. The note emitted — the fundamental of the voice — is more or less high or low according to the rapidity, the frequency of the movement. It is linked in good part to the length, to the thickness of the vocal cords: which is why voices evolve with age, particularly at the moment of the breaking of the voice, where the vocal cords develop strongly in men. But the role of the muscles of the larynx is just as important: on them depend the extent of the voice and the register. And what is more sensitive to emotions than the region of the throat and neck?

Timbre, for its part, is acquired in the passage of the sound wave through the resonance boxes that constitute the pharynx (the back of the throat), the mouth, the nose. And finally articulation: the movement of the tongue, teeth and lips transforms sound into language. There again, everything is given and malleable. The whole body is a vibrating instrument; the freer it is, the more sounds become rich and full. One readily imagines the vocal repercussions of the slightest tension…

Following an internal conflict, one may completely deteriorate the larynx. A senior executive had thus put himself in such a state that he had to be operated on urgently. Following a “promotion”, he had been asked, in addition to an already absorbing work, to give a series of courses for which he did not at all feel prepared. In a few weeks, he had found himself aphonic.

Conversely, by recovering the voice and the pleasure of using it, one may make disappear quite physical lesions, such as nodules on the vocal cords. This is frequent in children, in whom an “appalling” voice often only translates tensions, an imbalance in the family relations. Helped, the little patient recovers not only a more pleasant timbre, a larynx in good state, but a more satisfying place in his family.

Generally, however, the larynx is intact. If the voice is bad, it is because one uses it badly. The timbre may be too poor, too metallic; the melody monotonous, the delivery too slow or too rapid, the intensity too weak or too strong, the sound nasal; the overall effect in complete contradiction with the physical aspect, the apparent personality of the person who speaks. Mechanically, nothing easier to put right: it is a simple matter of gymnastics. Still, the mind must follow, one must accept to modify one’s sonic image. That is another story.

ABC: physical re-education

One finds at the base of most methods of work on the voice: to use the latter well, one must have a free respiration, departing from the diaphragm, like that of babies. And a correct posture, back well straight, without excessive curvature of the lower back and nape. The breath, the back? One finds here indeed the preferred seat of all tensions. There is nothing like, to block an emotion, “peeling” one’s respiration. Or closing oneself up by making the back round. To liberate one’s body is to put the instrument back in a state of functioning, to leave one’s postural defences. Often, this suffices for spectacular transformations to operate.

Yva Barthélémy, singing teacher, trains above all professionals. But her method, she assures us, is accessible to anyone. She frees even the timid, the victims of self-censure persuaded they are “incapable of emitting a note”. Her secret? Before the slightest vocalise, she has you do a whole gymnastics of the jaw, mouth, neck. She developed it herself, originally to re-educate herself: she had lost her voice. Today, the work she proposes allows, without risks, the astonishing development of one’s register. One uses one’s diaphragm to the maximum, one lengthens the nape. One sticks out the tongue to the nose or to the chin, one makes gargoyle grimaces, one imagines having in the mouth a tennis ball that swells, that swells, raising the palate. In short, one proceeds to a whole series of “internal dilatations” which allow the larynx to work in relaxation. And which deeply massage the solar plexus.

The result is perfectly euphorising. I arrived at my first class, exhausted by a stressful day. I left it in full happiness. “Practised in this manner, singing has astonishing results on the general state”, notes Yva. Doubtless because the gymnastics she proposes touches points particularly sensitive to tensions of psychological origin: nape, lower jaw, diaphragm, solar plexus? To succeed in relaxing them fully is already to see life in a new light!

Recovering one’s tonus

Numerous doctors and psychiatrists moreover send her “flat” patients: in no time at all, she has had them recover their tonus, physical and mental. “It is no accident if the voice is placed where it is: between the head and the body, she says. It can only function correctly when the two are in harmony. May one or the other take predominance, and everything seizes up…”

Developed by an Australian actor who would become aphonic on stage, the Matthias Alexander technique is paradoxical. To have a good voice, it teaches one not to touch it — to free everything else! Its base is a “gentle gymnastics” where the mental counts as much as the body. One essentially learns there “not to do” — not to thwart the instinctive movements of the body, naturally correct, by useless tensions. To speak, for example, one begins by freeing the nape, by letting the head find its correct place again: that is, when standing, well high without pointing the chin, the fontanelle as far as possible from the sacrum. One frees the shoulders, lengthens, broadens the back to the maximum — and everything starts functioning without problem, without effort, including the voice.

To speak, one needs breath. One tends to take it greedily, to fill one’s lungs too quickly, brutally, by jamming the shoulders and ribs. The result does not wait: the larynx stiffens, the voice goes off. In the Matthias Alexander technique, one begins by adopting a correct posture. Well relaxed. One lets the air enter quietly, without hurrying, without forcing in the least, without intervening. For instance, one is reading aloud. Each time one needs air, one stops, waits for the lungs to fill of themselves, and starts again. One detaches oneself completely from the text. Very quickly, one discovers that one has plenty of air to finish the sentence.

One makes whispered “a"s, amplifying the sound of the air without giving voice. The method is radical for seeing all that gets stuck below the larynx! One takes up these exercises in all positions: standing, knees slightly bent, supple shoulders, fingers lightly placed, without stiffening, without pressing, on the back of a chair. The back then broadens to the maximum, the respiration amplifies at the lower ribs, the voice recovers its full sonority by resonating in the whole thorax. One begins again on all fours, or lying on the back, knees bent… One does few vocalises: the work is oriented above all on practical life. One learns to speak with ease, to be heard. The secret? Before opening the mouth, to be fully conscious of oneself, of one’s body, and of what one may express.

“When my voice began to fray, when the hubbub became intolerable, recounts Alain Jacques, a teacher, I started to cease all activity, suddenly, in the middle of class. I would relax, breathe, let my head come back up to its place… and I would find the audience mute, attentive, suddenly silenced by surprise! I could resume in a calm, quiet voice…”

But voice problems are often complex, too much so for a simple work on the body, on the larynx, on phonation, to suffice to resolve them. The voice is then ill of what one wishes to say and dares not express. Or of what one refuses in oneself. To improve it is to make resurge the hidden conflict with increased force. The voice, then, can only be put right with deep psychological work.

A new birth through the ear

The ear plays in particular a fundamental role in the re-education of the voice. Alfred Tomatis holds that speech disorders are corrected as they are created: through the ear. According to this researcher who has been working on the question since 1954, most are of psychological origin and must be overcome by a “new birth”, a “new” acoustic “education”. To speak correctly, to have a well-articulated language, an agreeable timbre, a clear predominance of the right ear is needed — what he calls “directing”.

These last points, as may be guessed, do not have unanimous agreement. Tomatis affirms that he has demonstrated them through colourful experiments. He asked a singer, a professional actor, to present a part of their repertoire where they were particularly at ease, before a device permitting the return to their ears of the sound of their own voice, filtered. When the two earphones function normally, no problem. When the sound reaches only the right ear, the sonority, the phrasing become even better. The guinea-pigs themselves note an increased ease. Leave them only the left ear, and bang! They lose all their means. The voice becomes heavy, coarse, the rhythm slows considerably, the virtuoso starts singing out of tune…

Listening, Tomatis assures, begins before birth, in the maternal womb. The good use of the ear depends on our first relations with our parents. A conflict with the father may produce an auditory “left-hander”, with all the disorders that follow: stammering, dyslexia, bad voice and bad integration with the world. A refusal of the maternal voice is worse still: it is the whole of communication with the exterior that is put in question, sometimes to the point of autism or the most serious mental disorders. Even in “normal” subjects, the ear is extremely sensitive to various psychological shocks.

Fortunately, it can be reconditioned, recover its sensitivity, its suppleness through an adequate treatment: a kind of gymnastics under headphones thanks to a special apparatus, the electronic ear, capable of combating auditory laziness without the slightest intervention of the will, by playing on a whole system of filters and variations of intensity. Advantage: one has thus eliminated all the “parasites” which gradually came to be added to the voice under the effect of ambient sonic pollutions. One recentres, one finds oneself, one affirms one’s personality. The result is convincing: the C.E.S.D.E.L. counts among its clientele numerous voice professionals — lawyers, teachers, executives — who acquire there not only a more satisfying timbre, but a new assurance.

The “profile” once fixed, one may pass to a more creative phase: to play upon the ear to find, in one’s voice, a new inspiration. Contrary to Tomatis, the C.E.S.D.E.L. does not condemn the left ear. When it leads the game, its facilitators assure, it places our imagination, our sensitivity, in command. The right ear is that of reason, of intellect: to speak to it preferentially is to develop, and to use to the full, all one’s logical faculties. But what to do if one has the voice cut off, deformed by emotion, a false image of oneself? As soon as a progress is manifested, one risks refusing it, taking refuge more deeply in a defect. The voice is only a sophisticated system of defence.

A crossroads between self and other

“The voice is a crossroads between body and language, between conscious and unconscious, between self and other”, explains for her part Marie-Claude Pfauwadel. Phoniatrician and physician, she has just devoted a whole book to the voice, to its disorders and to its re-education: Respirer, parler, chanter (Le Hameau). She is, by the chances of her personal history, of psychoanalytic formation. This is in no way obligatory in her trade, but of essential utility in her practice. She nonetheless begins all “phoniatric assessments” — the examinations which serve as the basis for her diagnosis — with an attentive observation of the patient’s larynx. The vocal cords may be in such poor condition that a surgical intervention is required. This is rare: the voice is the domain par excellence of psychosomatic affections, of functional disorders.

Dr Pfauwadel received one day a teacher endowed with a perfectly unbearable little-girl voice, high, nasal. The patient did not come on her own initiative, but on the order of her school directress. She made rapid progress… and disappeared. The appointments were made in advance: Pfauwadel decided to wait. The patient finally returned, sheepish: “I arrived at your door, I could not enter. I think I prefer to keep my voice as it is…” To speak like a little girl had for her one advantage: it allowed her to make the impasse on sexuality. Without admitting it to herself, to lose this defence frightened her.

To confront a conflict, to modify the idea one has formed of one’s “destiny”, on the basis of one’s childhood experiences… By working on oneself, one may go back very quickly to the past. Rhythm expresses the manner of situating oneself in relation to the world: does one feel integrated or not? Intensity is attached to the level of energy. Very strong memories may arise when one is asked to speak louder or less loud than one is used to. Respiration is closely linked to emotional behaviours. As for non-vocal noises (clearings of the throat, smackings of lips), they translate impulses.

By a different bias, Henri Chédorge is launched into an emotional exploration of the same order as that of Magnabosco. The human voice, he says, is made to express the complete gamut of feelings. The Ancients not only knew it, but did it. There existed songs, voices for every circumstance of life. Each, man and woman, used the totality of his registers: the chest voice, also called “virile register” (it is the lowest), and the head voice, called derisively “the falsetto voice” since the 19^th century, when one began to reproach singers for being unable to access it in virile timbre.

With the industrial revolution and the development of masculine power in society, this sonic confusion of the sexes suddenly became “taboo”, as much on stage as at home.

Primordial song

It is this censure that Chédorge proposes to lift, in his “primordial song” workshops, where he endeavours to put his students in contact with primitive energies, pure joy without cause, the forces of nature that are within each of us. Like the antique singing schools, whose methods he has recovered through long documentary research, he concentrates his work on the zones where the registers cross. To find oneself vocally bisexual represents, for many participants, a salutary shock. When emotion becomes too strong, one passes to a more disembodied, higher register: a soaring into the highest of head voices. One would think of hearing angels in a cathedral. Then one plunges back into a joyful concerto of frog croakings.

“Remember, says Chédorge, to go up one must support one’s breath as low as possible; to descend, do not forget to make the voice resonate in the head.” By exploring all these extremes, one finds one’s centre. And the stability, the sureness of self which allows everything to pass into one’s voice, to say everything… Some block themselves, are afraid: Chédorge never forces anyone, imposes no progression. Each advances at his own rhythm.

One may finally seek in one’s voice pure pleasure. To work on it for, and through, its simple vibratory effect. It becomes then the sonic equivalent of a kind of acupuncture, whose action is strong on the physical, on the mental, on the spiritual, and on the level of energy. This is the case, among others, of psychophony, developed by a former opera singer, Marie-Louise Aucher, and used for nearly thirty years in psychotherapy, pedagogy and personal development.

At the maternity hospital of Pithiviers, in Dr Odent’s department, Marie-Louise Aucher even extends its benefits to children to be born. Within the framework of a preparation for “birth without violence”, emphasising the gentle welcome of the baby, she organises choirs of expectant parents. This would allow the foetus to enjoy, in its mother’s womb, a kind of sonic massage, excellent for the development of its nervous system. It renders, in any case, the atmosphere of the hospital particularly relaxed and warm.

The whole body is a vibrating instrument, says Marie-Louise Aucher. Each note of the human voice, whether one emits it or receives it, resonates at a particular point that ranges, from low to high, between the soles of the feet and the top of the head. These points are the same as those used in acupuncture.

Received, the voice may lull or aggress, provoking accumulations of nervous tension from which one may only liberate oneself by expressing oneself in turn. One may shout, but better to sing! In doing so, one “vibrates oneself”, from within. The effect is all the more beneficial as the voice is better placed. Having reached the optimum, one would feel as enveloped in a cocoon, totally in safety, euphoric…

To obtain such a result, psychophony proposes a precise progression. It supposes beforehand a relaxation, physical and mental, a correct posture, a deepened work on respiration. As for the vocal work proper, it broaches seven “planes of expression”, from simple voice placement to sacred singing: “Whether one is or is not a believer, assures Marie-Louise Aucher, there is nothing that allows the spirit to soar higher.”

As another practitioner of sacred singing explains, Iegor Reznikoff, the places where the voice resonates (head, throat, chest) are, in the body, the very spaces of prayer: by its high harmonics, the voice acts directly on consciousness. To sing represents one of the surest, quickest means to enter into meditation, to penetrate into the “invisible world” of the soul, of the spirit.

One thus recovers the “natural vibration” of the body, lost by years of sonic pollution. For Reznikoff, since the invention of the piano and its regular intervals, all music has become “false”. For years, he “washed his ear” by listening only to Eastern, African or primitive music. Then he reconstituted the Gregorian chants such as they must have been at the origin. His sacred singing groups, where Sanskrit neighbours Christian liturgy and our finest church music, attract passionate followers. “This work is for me an essential complement to yoga”, says one of his pupils. “I find in it the inner impetus that is missing in ordinary choirs”, says another. To attend a class, were it only as a listener, gives in any case an extraordinary sensation of peace and relaxation. One is enveloped in vibrations, one loses all sense of space and time, one soars…

One may go further still, lose oneself — or find oneself? — in the “mantras” that the Yoga of Sound proposes. There are now only pure sounds, from before language, without psalmody, without melody. Only the vowels: u (pronounced ou), a, ô, é, and the infinity of “ôm” that takes you no one knows where, but in total bliss. Under the guidance of Pierre Molinari, professor of aikido and shiatsu (acupuncture without needles) trained in Japan, we are there, seated in a circle, cross-legged or on the heels, back well straight, eyes closed, in a posture of meditation. The sound engulfs us, takes us out of ourselves, into an absolute “here and now”.

Semiophony: one must hear oneself…

You are installed in a physiology laboratory before a microphone. You have a headset on the head and you speak. Your voice passes into an amplifier and, for the needs of the experiment, it only returns to your ears with a time delay. After a few moments, you begin to stammer; soon, you will no longer be able to speak at all, you will become momentarily aphonic.

This experiment, among many others, has brought to light the role of the ear in the emission of speech. In technical terms, this is what is called the audio-phonatory loop. To speak, to emit sounds, to use one’s voice, one must hear oneself. It is on the basis of these observations that Dr Isi Beller developed in 1969 a method of re-education of language disorders.

Semiophony takes the evil at its root, this side of reading and writing, of speech and language: at the birth of the voice. The basic question is indeed: how to control one’s voice? Of course, we use the internal sensation transmitted to us by the vocal cords, the glottis, the pharynx, etc. But it is above all thanks to the ear that we can know the timbre, the accuracy and the power of our voice.

In current life, this monitoring is much less refined; it occurs unconsciously, almost at the reflex level. We have learned to listen to ourselves speak, first by imitating the other, the mother, the father; then by realising that we are capable of producing identical sounds. When language disorders — or of reading and writing — manifest themselves in a child, it is the sign that this primordial monitoring has not been acquired in a satisfying way. The semiophonic method, instead of seeking, like the classical methods, to raise, to make grow the child by a pedagogy that would allow despite all to build on cracked foundations, applies itself to circumventing the symptom, to helping the subject to relearn to control his voice, to hear himself, to listen to himself. One of the techniques used consists in increasing, thanks to a semiophone — a kind of specialised tape recorder connected to earphones — the quantity of high frequencies in the voice. It has indeed been possible to demonstrate that the high frequencies stimulate the language centre of the brain.

Semiophony, used principally for the re-education of language disorders in the child — with a significant percentage of success —, can help actors and singers to draw the maximum from their instrument. It also allows those who learn a foreign language to acquire a good accent, to enter into the body of the language.

— Constance Morsi

Cf. La Sémiophonie, les troubles du langage, la dyslexie, la rééducation sémiophonique, Maloine, 1973.

Sonic vibrations and mental faculties

If “gifts of predilection” corresponding to each European culture are found, it would perhaps be because of the region of the head where the phonemes of national languages vibrate, asserts Marie-Louise Aucher.

The Dutchman vibrates above all towards the occiput, at the back of the head, at the bottom of the visual area. Is it for this that there are so many great painters in the Netherlands? The German also vibrates at the back of the skull, but a little higher: at the top of the visual area. This would rather favour inner vision. Whence the great development of conceptual philosophy in this country.

The Italian rises straight to the top of the head, in the zone of the cortex where the consciousness of the feet is situated. Whence the qualities of balance, of natural ease, of perfect naturalness without mental complications of this people?

As for the Frenchman, he comes out near the nose in the prefrontal zone, that of intelligence, of logical and rationalised choices. For the English, finally, no problem nor particular gifts: they are the only Europeans to send the sound directly to the lips, without the slightest resonance in the skull, without the slightest vibratory massage of the brain.

To learn more

Les plans d’expression : schéma des psychophonie and L’Homme sonore, by Marie-Louise Aucher (Epi, 1982).
Chansons pour l’enfant à naître (cassettes), O.C.L., Atelier de Livry, 14241 Caumont l’Éventé.
Je me chante, 30 chansons pour la découverte du corps et l’éveil de la personnalité (UNI-DISC UD30 1387).
Respirer, parler, chanter, by Marie-Claude Pfauwadel (Le Hameau, 1981).
Trouver la voix, petit guide pratique du travail vocal, by Louis-Jacques Rondeleux (Le Seuil, 1982).
Alfred Tomatis has published three books: L’oreille et le langage (Le Seuil, 1963), L’oreille et la vie (Laffont, 1982), La nuit utérine (Stock, 1981).
La voix, by E. Garde (PUF, Que sais-je?, no. 954).
L’ombilic et la voix, by Denis Vasse (Le Seuil, 1974). Psychoanalytic viewpoint.
La voix, l’écoute, journal Traverses no. 24 (1980).

— Catherine Dreyfus, magazine Psychologie*, 1982.*