"The musical ear, an uncommon asset"
"The musical ear, an uncommon asset" — The musical ear and the psychological role of sounds (SON Magazine no. 35, February 1973)
Sixth interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 35, February 1973, Tomatis explores the musical ear and the psychological role of sounds. He develops there: the early loss of the primitive ear (“at 7-8 years, one has an ear that is worth nothing any more”), the link between the acoustics of places and the birth of instruments (a Stradivarius in the virgin forest does not sound, nor at the Nice Opera where Francescatti refuses to play), why Mozart is universal (composed with the ear of a child not yet “shackled in worries”), how syncopated music can “syncopate” the child in disagreement with his physiological rhythms, and why certain monks refuse to have Latin abolished (without it, no more Gregorian chant — and without Gregorian, no more ascetic structure). Tomatis concludes: “music is the most marvellous medicament ever invented”.
“SON” Magazine — no. 35 — February 1973
The musical ear and the psychological role of sounds
Alfred A. TOMATIS: “THE MUSICAL EAR, AN UNCOMMON ASSET”
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber
Presentation
Why military music makes crowds “march”… Why Zino Francescatti does not like playing at the Nice Opera… Why the Africans were unable to invent the Stradivarius… Why certain monks do not want Latin to be abolished… To these questions, and to others, Professor Tomatis replies in this new instalment of the series that SON Magazine has devoted to him since issue no. 30.
To “have an ear” is to have listening
Alain Gerber: It is commonly said that great musicians “have an ear”. You yourself take a particular interest in this organ. In light of your own experience, what meaning do you give to this expression?
Alfred Tomatis: For me, the one who has an ear is the one who has brought his auditory apparatus to its highest point of evolution. Without wishing to play on words, I would willingly say that the deep sense of “having an ear” is: having listening. Most people are persuaded that they have listening; in fact, they are gravely deprived of it. Listening is perhaps the least shared thing in the world!
A. G.: There is therefore in this domain a cleavage made from the outset between those who possess this gift and those who do not?
A. T.: This cleavage indeed exists, but it does not occur from the outset. At birth, on the contrary, we all have impressive gifts. The trouble is that life is made in such a way that it prevents us from exploiting them, then deprives us of them. We close our ear and cut ourselves off little by little from our own virtualities. At five, the process of regression is already well under way. At seven or eight, one has an ear that is worth nothing any more!
A. G.: But this is not true for everyone, precisely…
A. T.: No. And this is why people endowed with an excellent musical ear appear as exceptions. Mozart had the good fortune to compose music from the age of four. As a result, he kept all his life a remarkable ear. Those who were surrounded by music extremely early generally keep their primitive ear.
Music forms the whole man
A. G.: To a certain extent, then, it is music that forms the musical ear?
A. T.: I go further. I claim that music forms the whole man. Very probably, the human being sang, danced, well before he spoke. The two labyrinths of the ear are incontestably musical organs, and the cortical zone attributed to language has only superimposed itself on the zone originally attributed to music. It often happens that an actor confides to me his admiration for singers who have managed to memorise not only a text, but also a melodic line. In fact, he is wrong: when one wishes to remember a sung theme, one knows by heart up to seventy thousand verses of the Bible. The mnemotechnical means employed appealed to a kind of very simple “songs” along with an implication of the body, swayings back and forth, for example. Now this implication of the body was above all an implication of the labyrinth of the ear. Music comes to the aid of speech. Conversely, one may say that behind any quality speech, there is a fundamental musical attitude: people who know how to speak very well are musicians of language; they modulate, they use words by managing rhythmic swayings, etc.
The impedance of places and traditional musics
A. G.: You say that, owing to the impedance of places, almost every people has its particular “ear”, that is to say a specific audiometric curve. One observes moreover that many of these human groups possess a traditional music of their own. Are the two phenomena linked?
A. T.: Of course! In Africa, for example, the ethnic groups who practise a polyphonic music are those who live in forest regions. The influence of the multiple noises and rumours of the forest is determinant. Whereas in Chad, a desert country, music is entrusted to the single voice of the tom-tom. The impedance of the place, allied to the particular psychology of the natives, means that at a given moment a well-determined form of music will appear which, by conditioning the listening of a human group, will then condition all its other musical productions, with of course certain variants from one point of the territory to another. Thus, in France, the bourrée auvergnate and Breton folklore are not absolutely identical, but they have many points in common, notably on the rhythmic plane. After what I told you a moment ago, you will not be surprised that the specific elements of a music should impose themselves and then be transmitted like the specific elements of a language.
A music underlying each language
A. G.: According to you, one may even say that there is a music underlying each language?
A. T.: Exactly. You perhaps know that espionage uses radio waves to send messages. The interception of these is done today with the help of electronics, but in the 1950s, the counter-espionage soldiers picked them up manually by following the broadcasts on headphones. (They were so few that they were obliged to pick up two messages at once, one per ear, which occasioned serious disorders!) These messages, written in numerous languages, were in Morse. Now the persons responsible for the transcriptions were capable, without understanding any of these languages, of recognising them as they went by, simply from the cadence of the Morse signals! And I can assure you that they were not mistaken. The music underlying the language — here certain rhythms — sufficed to make it identifiable.
A. G.: Conversely, it sometimes happens that words, set to music, lose their semantic value…
A. T.: This sometimes even provokes an amusing dephasing. Take the Neapolitan song, for example. If the singer followed exactly what he said, he would kill himself at every line! Yet the dreadful dramas he recounts, he sings with a sun-filled voice: it is therefore clear that he understands nothing of his own discourse. The music has completely defused the language. So true is this that Italians not originally from Naples are absolutely incapable of understanding anything of the words of the Neapolitan song!
The Stradivarius in the virgin forest — and at the Nice Opera
A. G.: If a specific ear can explain a specific musical tradition, can it also account for the fact that certain musical instruments were invented and developed in very definite regions of the globe?
A. T.: Obviously. The first instrument of each is the surrounding air, which does not present the same characteristics in every place. Language and musical instruments are created by the exploitation of local characteristics. This is why it would have been quite impossible for an African to have the idea of the violin. A Stradivarius in the virgin forest does not sound! It even happens that it does not sound in certain very definite places on the European continent: at the Nice Opera, for example! Francescatti, who comes from Nice, always told me that he refused all contracts for Nice because there, his violin stubbornly refused to sound. In Naples, on the contrary, he has almost the impression that the instrument plays on its own!
A. G.: The acoustics of the Nice Opera are so deplorable?
A. T.: It is not a question of architecture: this opera is a replica of La Scala in Milan, which is known as a very propitious place! The disturbing element in this affair is the air of Nice. The impedance of the place is transformed by the curve of the Baie des Anges and the rolling of the sea. Do you know the Niçois language, which bears the imprint of these conditions? As if by chance, it is very low-pitched and very ugly. There exists no language less melodious than that of this country where Stradivariuses refuse to sing…
Music in the educational treatment
A. G.: You use music in your educational treatment: what exactly is its action on the subjects on whom you impose it under the Electronic Ear?
A. T.: With it, the child becomes aware of his body, he becomes aware of his rhythms, of all kinds of bodily “ignitions”. Music is made for this. It acts through the ear on the semicircular canals by giving different rhythms which accord with the physiological rhythms.
A. G.: Do all musics achieve this accord?
A. T.: Absolutely not! A selection must imperatively be made. If one plays for a child music of a syncopated kind, well, it is he who is “syncopated”, precisely! Every time he wants to make a movement, he will be stopped, brutalised, “stressed”! One can kill someone with sounds, or at least damage them gravely — for example, by systematically beating a musical theme outside the cardiac rhythm.
What is “good music”?
A. G.: From the point of view of the psycho-physiologist that you are, what then is “good music”?
A. T.: I think this very profoundly. Man is a whole. Just as his body seeks to attain and preserve a certain state of equilibrium, so the mind is drawn to the Beautiful. Man is drawn in this direction, whatever he does. He who refuses the Beautiful is like a child who, in a train rolling at one hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, would howl: “I don’t want the train to move.” We are carried along by the Beautiful. The Beautiful is life. This universal harmony cannot be avoided.
A. G.: However, much more bad music is consumed than good. Without bad music, the record companies would almost all go bankrupt! If man is irresistibly drawn to the Beautiful, if quality music ensures a better physical and psychic equilibrium, how is it that the great mass of people is fascinated by the most mediocre variety music?
A. T.: Because people are mediocre! Or rather no: they have been made mediocre by the education they have been given. It is truly an anti-education, since they are made to lose the gifts they had at birth. Before the age of five, most children are not mistaken about the quality of the music they hear. For my part, I have recorded a salutary reaction on the part of people themselves for some years now. The trouble is that those who live off mediocrity do not hear it that way and do everything in their power to condition people to the products they want to sell them, which has the effect of de-conditioning them to quality products! The best proof that people’s taste is not at fault is that tens of thousands of records of an artist are sometimes manufactured as if it were a confirmed star, even though no one has yet had the chance to hear him!
A. G.: But the ear should refuse this music which, fundamentally, does not suit it?
A. T.: It accepts it because it has visceral resonances. It responds to other conditionings. It is the bottle, it is mummy-daddy, it is the maternal womb. People find in there the original cloaca. Besides, there is no need to worry about it: what is grave is not what one receives from the outside, but what one produces oneself. What damages an individual is what comes out of him.
Syncopated music and the newborn
A. G.: You were saying earlier that, in listening to good music, the subject should have the impression that he could continue if the melody stopped: is this not to favour the most droning musics?
A. T.: If a music is too predictable, it does not have the effects I have described. Precisely, the most beautiful themes weary, cease to move truly when, having been heard too often, they become perfectly predictable. What I wanted to underline is that, in the treatment I have developed, certain musics are not adequate insofar as they cultivate brutal ruptures.
A. G.: Is this to say, for example, that parents put a newborn at risk by making him hear only syncopated music?
A. T.: Surely, for this music is in disagreement with the cardiac, respiratory and other rhythms. There may be tolerance on the part of the child, but in no case acceptance. They are punches he receives. One must already be very accustomed to bear this shock. Likewise, a music that contains too many unexpected elements puts the listener in danger, obliged to behave like a cyclist fearing at each crossroads to be knocked down by a vehicle he had not seen coming!
The ear, dynamo of cortical recharge
A. G.: What do you make the children who follow your treatment listen to?
A. T.: A type of music that responds to a primordial function: to provide the individual with equilibrium and recharge. The ear is a dynamo: that is its great function. Men, moreover, very quickly realised this, since from time immemorial they have used it as a recharging apparatus. Long ago, for example, they sought to know which sounds were most effective in achieving this recharge. By placing the labyrinth in a certain posture, one can mobilise people as one wishes: one makes them dance, one makes them march (which is precisely what military musics are for). To set an individual in motion, no need to ask his opinion! One addresses oneself directly to his labyrinths and to his spinal cord! Still, there must be enough high frequencies to provoke a continual recharge. With low frequencies, the effect is different. See what happens with those primitive drum musics that are known to all as “enchanting”. One must take this adjective literally: a being plunged into a state of trance finds himself entirely placed at the mercy of another. His body has been used while being put in the impossibility of reacting.
A. G.: What are the sounds most favourable to the recharge of an individual?
A. T.: Those that respond to the distribution of the cells of Corti on the organ of Corti. To be in a position to recharge the brain, one must produce sounds that will pass where there are the most cells: sounds situated above 300 hertz, notably between 800 and 3,000 Hz.
Why Mozart?
A. G.: Can you cite examples of musics you use in your laboratory?
A. T.: Always the greatest musics, but it seems that Mozart is particularly indicated…
A. G.: Why Mozart?
A. T.: I believe it is because he began to compose very young. And throughout his life he composed with the same ear: that of a human being not yet completely shackled in worries. This is why he touches so many very diverse people. In the course of my career, I have seen very few people refuse this music when they are under the Electronic Ear. As for proving that this music energises, nothing easier. So-called modern musics, “yé-yé”, were played to primitives of Amazonia: they remained with their arms dangling and showed no interest in what they were hearing. Then they were played Mozart, and immediately they showed great delight.
A. G.: But military music, which does not have the qualities of Mozart’s, does it also energise?
A. T.: In any case, the same primitives proved insensitive to it… except for Sambre-et-Meuse! But you are right. Moreover, I sometimes use this kind of music too. To return to certain current musics, the pop and rock musics in particular, the reproach I make to them is that they do not sufficiently recharge the listener.
A. G.: One could say that the proportion of high frequencies is too low compared with the importance of the low ones?
A. T.: Exactly. As a result, it is as if one demanded of a car much more than the dynamo can charge! Current musics exhaust the human batteries. Although some of them, on the contrary, induce recharge without provoking expenditure. Result: the one who listens to them feels all electrified.
The ear, element of posture
A. G.: From all you say, a general idea emerges: for you, the ear is not simply a “pavilion”.
A. T.: Certainly not! The ear is an element of posture, of charge and of equilibrium. It participates first and foremost in the individual’s control over himself.
A. G.: Does this mean that one can transform people through sound?
A. T.: Indeed. One can energise them, as we have just seen; one can also make them undergo a kind of sonic asceticism, extremely profitable for the development of their deep personality…
A. G.: Acoustic yoga, in a way…
A. T.: If you like. Most people are loath to admit that they can be changed thanks to the action of an apparatus (in this case, my Electronic Ear), but this is to forget that man himself is but a machine, a marvellous machine.
Music: the most marvellous medicament ever invented
A. G.: According to you, music is a primordial element of the human environment?
A. T.: Do you know why certain monks are loudly asking that Latin not be abolished for them? Because if there is no more Latin, there is no more Gregorian chant. And they know very well that if they lose Gregorian (which serves to separate man from his desires by obliging him to take a certain physical and psychic posture), they lose their whole ascetic structure! They do not lose their faith, certainly, but they lose everything that allows them to attain an equilibrium in monastic existence.
A. G.: In conclusion, one might perhaps ask what man is entitled to expect from music…
A. T.: If man were capable of analysing this problem correctly, he would no doubt realise that music offers him greater possibilities of escape than all drugs combined. Music is the most marvellous medicament ever invented, the greatest process of education that can be imagined in the awareness of one’s body, in the awareness of one’s evolution, etc. Man, let us think on it, is a sonic animal.
A. G.: It is therefore useless to ask you if you are in favour of a musical education from the earliest age, in both family and school…
A. T.: Nothing, indeed, could be more desirable. And yet we are not there yet. When I think that children are not even really taught to sing! And when one finally resolves to do so, it is done in an absurd way. When by chance I want to amuse myself, I open a song book: the number of stupidities printed in it is unbelievable! But that is another story…
Place of this interview in the series
This interview is the sixth 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 musical ear and the psychological role of sounds — Alfred A. Tomatis: The musical ear, an uncommon asset”, SON Magazine no. 35, Paris, February 1973. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.