"How the child is born to sounds"

Third interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 32, November 1972, Tomatis takes up the origin of language and the auditory life of the foetus. Starting from Psammetichus’s pharaonic myth on the origin of language, the author demonstrates that no physiological organ specifically destined for speech exists — it is a diverted assemblage of elements from the digestive apparatus (lips, mouth, tongue) and from the respiratory apparatus (larynx, nasal cavities). What distinguishes man is not the power but the will to communicate, the root of which is found in utero in the sound dialogue between mother and foetus. Tomatis supports his thesis with the work of Negus (songbirds) and Konrad Lorenz (ducklings and eggs), as well as the “sign of the first name” of André Thomas. He then details the evolution of the ear at birth — the “sonic birth” — and recounts a striking experience with a nine-year-old child who relives her own birth under intra-uterine simulation apparatus.

“SON” Magazine — no. 32 — November 1972
Intra-uterine listening
Alfred A. TOMATIS: “HOW THE CHILD IS BORN TO SOUNDS”
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber

The pharaonic myth of the origin of language

In its own way, Antiquity knew the division of labour. Sphinxes set certain riddles; pharaohs sought to solve others.

One of them, for example, had taken it into his head to discover how this marvellous instrument of communication, language, came to men. In this fine dream, he had been preceded by legions of philosophers. But he, he believed he had found the means to put an end once and for all to this mystery. The trick: it sufficed to take children at birth, isolate them from all contact with beings endowed with speech, and patiently wait for them to begin to speak. The first word endowed with meaning to leave their mouths would be, without doubt, the initial link of all speech: “the origin of language”! The royal experimenter was not disappointed. This first word, one day, was pronounced, and it was, so they say, the word for “bread”.

Naturally, it is rigorously impossible that things happened in this way. This edifying story is only a myth, one of the numerous myths engendered by humanity in its slow march towards Knowledge. But then, what answer can be given to the riddle?

Language, back to the present

Not so long ago, the study of language was still the preserve of a few specialists, the linguists, most of whose work met only with polite indifference. But, suddenly, everything has changed. Language today is at the centre of the preoccupations of psychologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, engineers and even of advertising people who ask linguists for recipes for selling shaving cream or packet soup better.

An otorhinolaryngologist, Alfred Tomatis has himself become passionately interested in these problems. To a certain extent, he has even given a new topicality, I should say a new virginity, to the old question of the origin of language, from which one had finally turned away, for want of a satisfactory answer. But he poses it in his own way, at a deliberately modest level.

It is no longer a question of determining in what circumstances a human being for the first time acceded to the stage of speech, but only of asking two things:

First: how does man manage to produce articulated sounds?
Second: why does he feel the need to produce them?

The “how”: no specific organ of language

The first of these questions will surprise the naïve by its naïveté. Does Tomatis not know, like everyone else, that we can speak because our body is endowed with an apparatus expressly destined to perform this function? Well, no! he does not know it. Or rather, he refuses to know it. And he is quite right, for it is not true!

It is not at all on the side of physiology that the solution must be sought. “Nothing is less physiological than speaking!” he affirms. And he explains: “It is no doubt a human phenomenon, but there does not for all that exist any organ physiologically preconceived to that end. Nothing, it is true, in the catalogue of our accessories, is really destined for this use. We have been provided, certainly, with a digestive apparatus; we have also been endowed with a respiratory apparatus, but nothing has been specially delivered to us for language, oral language that is. What learned arrangement, what improbable combination has been needed to attain this end! A first set made of a part of the digestive apparatus: the lips, the mouth, the soft palate, the tongue, the teeth; and a second pertaining to the respiratory apparatus: the larynx, the nasal cavities, the lung, the diaphragm, the thoracic cage — these have come together to acoustic ends.”

In fact, to put itself at the service of speech, the larynx has diverted itself from its primary function. It has freed itself. And this liberation has coincided with that of the ear, initially destined to localise sounds, but which began to analyse.

The coincidence ought not to surprise unduly: ear and larynx live in a veritable “organic intimacy”, as any manual of anatomy teaches. Consequently, hearing and phonation condition each other reciprocally: man speaks insofar as he hears, and he hears by predilection the sounds of speech.

Hence the apparently paradoxical formulae of our researcher: “We speak with our ear,” or again: “It is sound that fabricates the ear.”

The “why”: a desire to communicate

So the problem of the how is solved. There remains the why. For it is not enough to show that the human being can speak. From a purely physiological point of view, the monkey can also speak. The fact remains, however, that it does not speak!

The greatest efforts deployed to that end in the United States have not succeeded in making a chimpanzee pronounce more than five simple words, all bearing on its elementary needs.

What counts, therefore, is not the power, but the will. At the origin of language, one should find a desire. Of what kind? For Tomatis, there is no hesitation: a desire to communicate with others.

Rejecting all the fables on the genesis of language, he deliberately stops at this hypothesis: “Perhaps it suffices for us to think that the hominid line was, thanks to an exceptional conjuncture, endowed with an intelligence sharp enough to exploit language for the purpose of life in common, familial or social, in the desire to communicate, in the need to enrich others with one’s own impressions and to accumulate the information gathered by others.”

What best characterises language, indeed, is that it distinguishes men from the other animals, but brings men closer to one another.

The desire comes from afar — uterine life

Alfred Tomatis is no dogmatist. He could not therefore content himself with affirmation. Patiently, he probed this first idea, sufficiently reliable to serve as a basis for more precise research. And first, he asked himself: this desire to communicate, this need to maintain a permanent contact with others — whence does it come?

What he understood at once was that it came from afar. Probably it was elaborated from uterine life onward. At the outset, this was but an intuition. But little by little Alfred Tomatis was to gather the elements that would allow him to support it, then to verify it.

Negus and the songbirds; Lorenz and the ducklings

“In a thousand-page work,” he recounts, “I came one day upon a sentence that seemed to bring a confirmation of my thesis. Negus, an English author, had observed that if the eggs of songbirds were brooded by non-singing birds, the birds of that brood did not sing. Better still, if the eggs are brooded by birds that do sing, but in another fashion, the chicks at birth are very likely to ‘mistake’ the song!”

One could therefore think that an audio-vocal conditioning was already possible at the egg stage. This is what the experiments of Konrad Lorenz subsequently verified. He spoke to eggs and observed afterwards that the ducklings born from these eggs turned their heads towards him and rushed to his side as soon as he pronounced a word, as if some secret and indefectible bond tightened each time there was communication through language.

“Butterflies are irresistibly attracted by light: this is called a ’tropism’. Well, in the case of the ducklings, there was a genuine phenomenon of tropism provoked by Lorenz’s voice! Why should one not meet a similar one in the human kind?”

André Thomas’s “sign of the first name”

This time, it is a specialist in newborns, André Thomas, who proved to him that he was on the right track. “It is,” the Professor resumes, “the famous experiment of the ‘sign of the first name’. Before the child is ten days old, one seats him, for example, on a table, and one pronounces his first name. He does not react, so long as it is not his mother who speaks; but when she begins to pronounce his first name, the newborn directs his body towards her and falls to her side. This is, André Thomas assures us, a fact one can observe permanently. Manifestly, we are once again in the presence of a tropism.”

Indeed, and the comparison with the previous case suggests itself. Lorenz had spoken to the eggs: the ducklings react to the sound of the voice. If the little child reacts to the sound of his mother’s voice, it is probably because she spoke to him while he was still an embryo of a man. This does not necessarily mean that she addressed the foetus directly, as an interlocutor, but simply that the latter is in close relation with the maternal voice, by the very fact of its localisation.

The mother and the child in utero

“The mother,” Alfred Tomatis observes, “makes her child, gives him a nest in herself, nourishes him, prepares him for life through a dialogue made of all the contacts she may have with him; sound communication is the principal among them. 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 voice that speaks… He is soaked, impregnated by it; he thus integrates the support of his mother tongue.”

Here it is, then, the first audio-vocal communication! A communication in which the embryo, when all goes well, draws a feeling of security thanks to which he can develop harmoniously.

From then on, it was tempting to think that the desire to communicate was but the desire not to break, or possibly to re-tie, a relation (among others, acoustic) so satisfactory with others.

A voice awaited like the bottle

The foetus hears. That is a fact established. But this does not for all that mean that he hears in the same way as we adults hear. On the contrary, it seems that there is a whole evolution of the auditory function.

From birth to maturity, for example, the “opening” of the ear is progressive. On the other hand, birth itself brings a fundamental modification in listening, because the ear, adapted to the liquid milieu of intra-uterine life, must suddenly accommodate to an aerial milieu.

“Before birth,” notes Dr Tomatis, “the three parts of the ear — external, middle and internal — are therefore acoustically adapted to the same frequencies, which are practically those of water and which lie in great part beyond 8,000 hertz. At birth, one witnesses a veritable sonic birth. The first two storeys of the newborn’s ear, the external ear and the middle ear, will have to adapt to the impedances of the surrounding air, while the third storey represented by the inner ear keeps its liquid milieu…”

“The first days after birth nevertheless leave the child in a state of transition on the plane of sonic life. The middle ear, and in particular the Eustachian tube, keeps amniotic fluid for ten days, so that the two storeys — middle ear and inner ear — remain tuned to the same frequencies, those of the liquid milieu…”

“After the tenth day, everything goes out, I would venture to say. It is the great period of sound shadow that begins. The Eustachian tube empties of its liquid substance, the newborn loses his perception of the high frequencies, he almost no longer hears. He will have, for weeks, in the course of a long apprenticeship, to seek to increase the accommodative power of his ear, in order to find again little by little, through the surrounding air, the contact he once had with that voice which cradled him in the depths of his uterine universe. Progressively, around an axis lying between 300 and 800 hertz, the auditory diaphragm will open to the sound world…”

“The child will thus little by little recover a tympanic tension that will allow him to relive a perception he had known throughout his foetal sonic life… The newborn finds again the voice that had so long sustained him in the deepest of his uterine night. It is transformed, certainly, but he recognises its inflections, its rhythm, and will henceforth know how to open his listening to this new mode of communication, to seek therein the nirvana so recently abandoned.”

"This vocal nourishment is as necessary to our human structuring as the suckling we absorb… This voice that we await as impatiently as the bottle, rapidly associated with the maternal face, will produce in us responses, little cries of joy or sorrow."

Experimentally reproducing intra-uterine listening

Alfred Tomatis has been able to determine the various passbands corresponding to the different stages of this development. He has also been able to reproduce experimentally intra-uterine listening thanks to an apparatus of his own making. He places in water a loudspeaker surrounded by a rubber membrane, injects music or speech through a tape recorder, and records these sound messages thanks to a microphone also placed in the water.

The results are passionately interesting. He makes montages of them in the laboratory. He speaks of them around him. The psychoanalysts begin to prick up their ears… This summary apparatus will reveal itself endowed with strange powers…

The nine-year-old girl who relives her birth

As often happens with great researchers, the most fertile discoveries seem to depend on chance events. But one should not trust this too much: as if by chance, chance always knocks at the same doors!

“One day,” A. Tomatis recalls, “I was demonstrating what could be obtained with this apparatus to one of my clients who happened to be there. I wanted him to tell me what he thought of it. But without paying particular attention. I triggered the conditions of what I was later to call the ‘sonic birth’ — that is to say the passage from hearing in aquatic milieu to hearing in aerial milieu. And then we hear a child’s voice! It was the daughter of my client, who was sitting in a corner of the room and to whom we had not been paying attention for some time. She begins to have a kind of extraordinary waking dream. ‘I am in a tunnel, and then I see two angels in the background — two angels dressed in white.’”

“We looked at each other, her father and I. I thought suddenly that she was visualising her own birth, as if she were in the uterine canal and saw at the other end the doctor and the midwife in their white coats! After a few minutes that seemed to us half a century, the child tells us: ‘Now I see mummy.’ There was no longer any possible doubt. In the father, anxiety was rising visibly. ‘How do you see her, mummy?’ he cried. ‘Like this!’ the child answered, taking the gynaecological posture. At that moment, the tape stopped… At the time, the child was nine years old. Everything she had told us, it was impossible that she had invented.”

How to explain this scene, worthy of a fantastic film? One had to admit that there was a close relation between sonic birth and birth proper, since the former had the power to make certain subjects relive the latter.

It was observed on the other hand that one could, through simple acoustic information, trigger extremely intense psychological reactions in depth. From then on, could one not imagine controlling them so as to provoke deliberately certain effects on the psyche? Could one not hope to make use of them to relieve certain disorders of a psychopathological nature? The field that opened to exploration was immense. Alfred Tomatis, researcher to the core, could not resist for very long such a call.

Place of this interview in the series

This interview is the third 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, “Intra-uterine listening — Alfred A. Tomatis: How the child is born to sounds”, SON Magazine no. 32, Paris, November 1972. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.