"We speak with our ear" — Alfred Tomatis

First interview of the series conducted by Alain Gerber with Professor Alfred A. Tomatis in the monthly journal SON Magazine (Paris). Published in no. 30 — September 1972 — under the title “We speak with our ear”. More than a classical interview, this first issue is an introductory portrait: Gerber recounts the genesis of Tomatis’s research (the first singer-patient whose voice broke on stage, the Aeronautical Arsenals, the analysis of Caruso’s voice, the discovery of the directing ear through Beniamino Gigli and Daniel Sorano), the birth of the “Tomatis Effect” communicated to the Académie Nationale de Médecine in 1957, and that of the Electronic Ear (“a string-and-sealing-wax invention” that became, from 1954 onwards, a mature clinical apparatus). The great chapters of Tomatis’s thought are already sketched: ethnic ears, language learning, dyslexia (“we read with our ear”), and sonic birth for children not yet born to language.

“SON” Magazine — no. 30 — September 1972
The role of the ear in human development
Alfred A. TOMATIS: “WE SPEAK WITH OUR EAR”
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber

Presentation

He soothes the anxious, calms the nervous, balances the unstable, helps in assimilating foreign languages. He combats overwork, stammering, ringing in the ears and spelling mistakes. He makes people sing in tune, he teaches them to read well, he restores failing wills and gives back memory to those who have lost it. It is sometimes said that he makes the deaf hear; it has even been written that he makes children intelligent…

This miracle-doctor is Professor Alfred Tomatis. Researcher, inventor, theoretician, he is above all a therapist. His field, his ground of experience, his passion: the ear. Not everything perhaps starts there, but what a crossroads, what a switching post! Enter the labyrinth, with Alain Gerber.

The man and the work

From the outside, it is difficult, when one is placed in the presence of so sensational a record, to disentangle fiction from reality. Where does the legend begin? Where do this man’s real powers end? Some of his detractors are not finicky: none of it is true, or so little as makes no difference! Meanwhile, his supporters stand ready to swear that he works miracles. All this makes Alfred Tomatis smile, for he is taken in neither by the one camp nor the other. “With me,” he says, “there is no middle ground: either I am taken for a charlatan, or for the Good Lord himself.” But he keeps a cool head. He knows what he wants. He knows what he is worth. And there is no time to waste in vain polemics. Researcher, inventor, theoretician — his latest book, Éducation et Dyslexie, is currently engaging the interest of specialists — Dr Tomatis is first and foremost a therapist. Relieve first, discuss afterwards. No great psychologist is needed to see that he has, as the saying goes, “his feet on the ground”. “Only the facts count,” he notes in his book. It is a principle that may seem simplistic, but it is by scrupulously holding to it that he has been able to make all his discoveries. For Alfred Tomatis — and this is a detail worth noting — belongs to that race of researchers who find.

He finds strange things, in truth, well suited to dumbfound the naïve and offend the partisans of official science, ever anxious to preserve as dogma the truths of the day before yesterday. In the eyes of all these people, he is the man of wild hypotheses and scabrous theories — the man through whom scandal comes! He can do nothing about it, so he troubles himself little with it. “I am no polemicist,” he confides. He prefers to work and to draw ever more far-reaching consequences from the intuition he had many years ago and which lies at the root of his whole œuvre: man does not live merely “with” his ears, he lives “through” his ears. Tell me how you listen and I will tell you who you are… I will tell you how you feel, how you react, how you suffer, what your complexes are, and how you sing, how you read, how you draw, how you think, how you carry yourself!

It is precisely this that makes many of his adversaries baulk: with a single password, to penetrate an infinity of domains? It is true that one must beware of integral solutions, of panaceas. But for some, the only disquiet comes from the fact that Tomatis is trampling their flower-beds! And it is a fact: he has not respected reserved hunting grounds. He has transgressed taboos. In short, Alfred Tomatis disturbs people. But he, apparently, is hardly disturbed by it! Like Sigmund Freud, whose conceptions he willingly evokes, he holds that a scientist has duties to his science that may well demand the sacrifice of a few susceptibilities, more or less well placed.

The first singer-patient

“At the outset,” he recalls, “I was an otorhinolaryngologist. But I was also the son of a singer. Everything started from there. A friend of my father’s, himself a singer, came to see me one day: although an artist of great class, he sang out of tune. He brought me the diagnosis of an eminent Viennese speech therapist who had found his larynx distended. I tackled this lesion by every means. For two years I tried to re-tension his vocal cords. Finally, I thought I had succeeded: his voice recovered its accuracy. But shortly afterwards my client choked up on stage! I suffered the same failure with another singer some time later.”

Others might have been forever discouraged from the rebuilding of distended larynxes; Dr Tomatis drew a lesson from it. The larynx, he supposes, is certainly not what makes one sing in or out of tune. It remained to determine which was the guilty organ…

At the Aeronautical Arsenals

“At the time, I was directing the acoustics laboratory of the Aeronautical Arsenals. I was examining people whose hearing had been damaged by working on the test beds of the supersonic engines, to determine whether they should be compensated. I had the idea of testing the hearing of these two singers and I noticed that, in both cases, it showed weaknesses. Weaknesses that strangely recalled what I had observed in the Aeronautics men. I then wondered whether they were not damaging their ear by singing. At the outset, this was an aberrant hypothesis, but it proved fertile.”

“The vocal emission of a normal person never exceeds eighty decibels, but an average professional singer, at one metre, produces at least ninety. A great tenor produces one hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty! Which makes about one hundred and fifty decibels in the skull. Now an ATAR engine on the ground produces one hundred and thirty-two decibels: there is not the same energy, but the same output intensity. It was therefore logical to think that if these singers sang out of tune, it was because they had broken their ear. I concluded that a subject reproduced vocally only what they were capable of hearing.”

The birth of the “Tomatis Effect”

This phenomenon, which in 1957 was the object of a communication to the Académie Nationale de Médecine, is today known under the name of “TOMATIS EFFECT”. Its simplest scientific formulation is the following: “The larynx emits only the harmonics that the ear can hear.” But its discoverer sometimes puts it more lapidarily: “We speak with our ear.” Already, this is a small revolution. But Tomatis does not stop there. He now decides to make the journey in reverse. By analysing the recordings of great deceased tenors, he thinks, he should be able to form an idea of how they heard during their lifetime. He thus succeeds in establishing Caruso’s audiometric curve.

Only, he is all too aware of this: a theory built on the back of a dead man no longer there to defend himself does not present all the indispensable scientific guarantees. Fortunately, his parents are intimate friends of another great vocal artist: Beniamino Gigli. A few years earlier, he had calculated his audiometric curve. By comparing it with the curve obtained from the records, he notes a perfect coincidence. This is a new point gained; others will follow.

The directing ear

If one takes a singer and examines his audiometric curve, one finds that the control he exerts over his voice through his ears is not of the same quality on the right and on the left. Indeed, if, during the singing, one makes him lose control of his hearing on the left side — by dazzling or by injecting noise — he can be heard to sing just as well. He even sings better! Conversely, if one attacks his right ear, he loses much of his ability. The same holds for musicians. “When I touch Francescatti’s right ear, it is as if he had a piece of wood in his hand instead of a Stradivarius.”

The conclusion to be drawn is that the right ear is the directing ear. This means that it, and it alone, is capable of ensuring auditory control and vocal control. If you really prevent a musician from hearing on the right, he becomes incapable of following the tempo; under the same conditions, the singer’s voice thickens, becomes dull, loses its accuracy. The subject sometimes even begins to stammer! “It is moreover interesting to note that in my whole career I have met only a single left-handed singer, and even then, I am not sure he really was.”

This is one of Alfred Tomatis’s great ideas: in all civilisations, left-handers have been the exception. The interest of an individual, in the struggle they wage for their adaptation to the world, lies in being right-handed. Not only of hand and foot, but of hearing, of speech and of thought! “One must be right-handed all the way to the left,” he likes to repeat.

From Caruso to the Electronic Ear

If a singer begins to sing out of tune, it is therefore on the right ear that the re-education must bear. It remains to know how to proceed. Once again, Caruso will be enlisted. Dr Tomatis notes that his ear presented a very particular characteristic: it allowed him to hear essentially the sounds of good quality, and almost not the bad ones. Why not try to give people with damaged hearing the ear of the famous singer? This can be done by means of a headset fitted on the subject’s skull. “The result is immediate: he becomes euphoric, he wants to sing, everything returns to what it was. The problem lies precisely here. How to make this spectacular but fleeting improvement permanent?”

It was necessary to invent a machine that would allow the subject to learn little by little to self-monitor as a great vocal professional hears. The research carried out to this end progressively led to the development of the adequate apparatus. “A string-and-sealing-wax invention!” the Doctor admits with a smile. A bit of tinkering, indeed. The thing functioned manually by means of noisy switches which in themselves constituted an obstacle to the treatment. The first results, however, were not discouraging. And the invention was going to benefit from all the progress of technology.

By 1954, thanks to the introduction of electronic gating, this artificial ear was in a position to function satisfactorily. It bears today the name “Electronic Ear with Tomatis Effect”; but this is not owed to Dr Tomatis himself. “The Electronic Ear,” he writes, “allows the creation of a conditioning that forces the ear to acquire its listening posture, through tympanic tension, by means of a regulation of the two muscles of the tympanic cavity — muscles of the malleus and of the stapes — which ensure, through the play of impedance adaptation, the passage of sound into the inner ear, where the analysis is carried out at the level of the first cellular relay of the decoding of verbal coding. It comprises, in particular, two channels joined by an electronic gate which leads the subject from ill-adapted hearing to adapted hearing, while another set of electronic gates preferentially releases the right auditory channel — which does not mean that the left channel is eliminated, as one might think, but simply that it does not perform the same function of vigilance in listening.”

The set is completed by a microphone, headphones, amplifiers that act on the two channels, and a sound source most often constituted by a magnetic tape recorded and mounted on a high-quality tape recorder. The treatment continues for ten minutes. On the second day, for twenty minutes. After a month, the subject emits sounds like those of a professional vocalist, because he is conditioned to listen to himself as does a man whose hearing is particularly adapted.

From Daniel Sorano to stammering

At the outset, however, it was still a matter only of helping singers to remain or become again masters of their art. The use of the machine was therefore quite restricted. It was a happy chance that allowed its inventor to glimpse the full extent of its possibilities.

“One day,” he recounts, “a great actor came to see me because he had lost his voice. He had been steered towards me because he was a former singer. I knew nothing about the actors’ voice. I therefore acted as for a singer: I imposed on him Caruso’s ear. He began to speak in an extraordinary way and soon everything returned to order. Today this actor is gone, but the beauty of his voice is still remembered: it was Daniel Sorano.”

“In the course of treatment, I suppressed his right ear to see what would happen: I saw him begin to stammer in front of me. By sound logic, I wondered whether stammerers were not quite simply people who had lost the directing ear. Strong in this hypothesis, I was able to relieve a few of them. Fortunately, some resisted the treatment. These failures proved to me that I still had many things to understand. So I persevered.”

From that point on, small finds and great discoveries were going to precipitate at an accelerated rhythm, linking with one another like the elements of a well-conducted demonstration.

The Venetian singers and ethnic ears

Dr Tomatis’s strength is that he does not content himself with what he has. He must always push to the extreme the consequences of his observations and of his theories. In 1954, several Venetian singers came to consult him because they could not pronounce the Italian “r”. They all said “l” instead. Now, they managed to correct this defect when they were conditioned to listen to themselves like Caruso. “I thought that if they were mute as regards a single letter, it was because they were deaf to that letter. I therefore wondered whether there was not an auditory selection proper to the Venetians. And if there was one proper to the Venetians, there must be one proper to the Milanese, one proper to the Neapolitans, etc.” Thus was born the idea that across space, the various human groups each had a very particular ear characterised by its band of selectivity. More extensive studies were to confirm this hypothesis.

Tomatis noted, for example, that the Italian ear registered its selectivity between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz, while that of the French ear lay between 1,000 and 2,000 Hz… From there to imagining that this disparity was the cause of the difficulties encountered in learning foreign languages, there was but a step. It was soon taken. Experiments show that certain children, gifted in all subjects and useless at English, are in fact deaf to that language, owing to a particularly “narrow” auditory selection. They can be freed from this deafness by being taught to hear as an Englishman hears.

“We read with our ear” — dyslexia

The results are so spectacular that our researcher is called to the rescue to set up language laboratories… A new development: the children thus treated not only become good Anglicists, but achieve super-performances in the subjects in which they already shone before! The parents come to congratulate Tomatis, and he notices that a phrase recurs regularly in their comments: “My son reads much better now!”

That is all that is needed for a new theory to take shape. It is one of the most surprising of all, one of the most difficult to swallow for sceptical minds. It lies entirely in this paradoxical formula: “we read with our ear”. “Yes,” Alfred Tomatis comments, “the ear is the royal road of language. As I wrote in my book, the written sign is in itself nothing but a sound to be reproduced, and it does not seem extravagant to compare writing to a sound recording. Writing surely appears as the first ‘magnetic tape’; it is that storehouse of sounds which human genius was able to fix for the first time in the history of civilisations… The ear is an organ whose pavilion is open to everything that is language. Even when that language is written!”

Immediately, our researcher glimpses a practical application of this idea: the treatment of dyslexics, who in France number one and a half million. Already, more than twelve thousand of them have been re-educated thanks to the Electronic Ear. And what is best, the results exceed expectations! Not only does the child make progress in reading, but he speaks better, memorises better, concentrates more, is more dynamic, more balanced, seems more glad to be alive.

Sonic birth

This is, according to Tomatis, because the individual is a unity and one does not touch the ear without touching the whole being, for the ear is the directional organ par excellence. It makes us communicate with the surrounding world, with others and also with our own self. It is possible that it conveys the fundamental affective relation between a mother and her child, while the latter still bathes in the uterine milieu. That communication begins well before birth is what psychoanalysts had already brought to light. Alfred Tomatis takes up the baton. He launches the hypothesis that “when the relation between mother and child has not been realised in utero, language risks not being triggered, and may even sometimes not exist”. The child is not born to language. One can remedy this by carrying out — a fantastic experience that resonates with all the myths of science fiction — a “sonic birth”: the passage from hearing in an aquatic milieu (that of the embryo immersed in the amniotic fluid) to hearing in an aerial milieu. In these astonishing sessions, one sees the child “re-born” in the literal sense of the term.

Language Centres throughout the world

After this, it should not surprise anyone that Tomatis is accused of playing the magus, of yielding to the temptation of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Obviously, he affronts coarse common-sense in its straw-stuffed clogs, this man who delivers, makes read, makes speak, makes sing and makes smile through the ear! Such pretensions! Besides, it is not impossible that the progress of knowledge will invalidate some of his most original views. This is the lot of all scientists: truth is never finished. But what matter, since he imagines, since he invents, since he asks questions, since he opens new tracks, since he shakes the apathy of the mandarins! What matter, since he heals people!

In any case, he owes nothing to anyone. His research, he financed himself, with the money his practice brought him. Today, he directs, at 68, boulevard de Courcelles, a Language Centre that takes charge of six hundred patients. Each of his machines can treat from ten to twenty persons a day. There are other centres in the provinces and abroad: in Belgium, in Germany, in Canada and as far as South Africa.

What troubles him most is that the propagation of his ideas should be so slow and so painful. But, in truth, he hardly has the time to deal with promotion. There is more urgent work to be done. They say he sleeps very little: it does not show. What is striking, on the contrary, is the magnificent collection of abstract paintings that adorns his walls. Alfred Tomatis also has eyes for seeing. On the table where he takes his meals, raw vegetables, cheese, fruit. No meat. Nor does he smoke. “You didn’t know that it damages the ear?” he asks, in false ingenuousness, before closing his door.

Place of this interview in the series

This interview is the first of a series of fifteen published monthly by Alain Gerber in the journal SON Magazine from September 1972 to December 1977. For the complete contents and access to the other interviews, see the mother-article of the series.

Source: Alain Gerber, “The role of the ear in human development — Alfred A. Tomatis: We speak with our ear”, SON Magazine no. 30, Paris, September 1972. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.