"Caruso became Caruso by chance"
"Caruso became Caruso by chance" — The singing voice (SON Magazine no. 36, March 1973)
Seventh interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 36, March 1973, Tomatis takes up the singing voice. His thesis: there is no particular gift for singing — everyone can sing if the ear is freed from the blockages that occurred during maturation. Tomatis sets forth his “photography of the voice” by panoramic analyser, examines the critical zone 800-3000 Hz, and reveals his explosive hypothesis on Caruso: the latter would have “become Caruso” following a surgical intervention in Spain in 1901-1902 which would have damaged his right ear, giving him the hearing of a tubal catarrh — paradoxically, the ideal ear for singing. Three witnesses have confirmed it: in town, Caruso always placed his interlocutors on his left.
“SON” Magazine — no. 36 — March 1973
The singing voice
Alfred A. TOMATIS: “CARUSO BECAME CARUSO BY CHANCE”
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber
Presentation
It was a surgical intervention to the face that gave Caruso the voice that was to make his glory… A hypothesis put forward by Professor Tomatis in the course of this interview devoted to the voice. According to the Professor, to “burst into song” is not a matter of particular gifts.
No “gifts” for singing — only blockages
Alain Gerber: Professor, the great singers seem to possess not only an exceptional technique, but exceptional gifts. What do you think?
Alfred Tomatis: All we observe around us is that certain people easily “produce” a B-flat, for example, while others seem condemned never to achieve it. For a long time, it was concluded that the subjects who sang well were benefiting from particular gifts. It is a conception against which I take exception…
A. G.: For what reasons precisely?
A. T.: I believe that any and all would be able to sing if they did not have certain blockages preventing them.
A. G.: Blockages of what sort?
A. T.: Blockages that are always situated in their hearing. One must start from the fact, objectively observable, that the ear “is” musical in the child. The trouble is that it does not always follow a normal evolution. One may even say that, given what happens in the majority of subjects, what is normal is that things do not evolve normally!
A. G.: What happens exactly?
A. T.: The ear is blocked or “stressed”, aggressed at different moments of its maturation, and the subject loses the habit of hearing musically.
It is not the larynx but the ear
A. G.: For you, then, it is the ear that is principally at issue in the inaptitude to sing, and not the larynx?
A. T.: I have come across I do not know how many larynxes well built, well muscled, and which were nevertheless incapable of singing. Conversely, many singers continue to ply their trade, and to do it well, with a damaged larynx. The problem is therefore situated elsewhere, and all sorts of experiments have led me to think that it lay in hearing. To be able to sing, one needs a special perception, by the subject himself, of his own voice at the moment when it is emitted.
A. G.: It is therefore a question of self-listening?
A. T.: Exactly. A great singer is someone who does not hear himself as others hear themselves, and who, from this point of view, constitutes an exception. All great singers have a technique of self-listening that is identical. What differentiates them is that, even if each possesses a very extensive register, there exist preferential registers. This register is a kind of passband which, for a given individual, is better, and which corresponds to the passband of the ear…
The body as instrument
One must also take account of the resonances proper to each person’s body: from this point of view, each man is a particular instrument. Some are Stradivariuses, others ordinary violins. The play of the musculature comes into play, the density of the bone walls, etc. When one struck Caruso’s skull, it produced, apparently, an extraordinary sound! If you set yourself seriously to working at singing, you will notice that your skull itself ends up singing, emitting sounds quite different from those it produced before.
A. G.: What is the explanation of this phenomenon?
A. T.: Simply that you are polarising the molecular set of the structure itself. Moreover, by sending sounds onto the skull, one can locate the zones of sensitivity where the high frequencies, the low ones, etc., are distributed.
A. G.: The skull is not alone in play?
A. T.: No, one must also speak of the thoracic cage, which plays precisely the role of a very large sounding box. It is even a resonance cage before being a respiratory cage. Other parts of the body, too, are to be taken into consideration in the process of auditory feedback.
The rupture at 1500 Hz and vocal accuracy
A. G.: I suppose there is also an explanation for the fact that so few people naturally sing in tune…
A. T.: It is precisely linked to the fact that to sing in tune naturally, one would need to be able to let the ear be what it was at the outset. The misfortune is that what we call language passes through the zone where accuracy will be implicated. And for multiple reasons — particularly because we ill accept this language — we provoke a rupture in this zone, singularly at the level of 1,500 hertz.
One still hears music well, which requires the ear to be ascending up to 500 hertz, but any rupture between 1,000 and 1,500 hertz means that one surely sings out of tune. If this rupture is not very important (only 5 to 10 decibels), the subject hears himself singing out of tune and tries to correct himself. If the deficiency is very pronounced, he sings out of tune without even realising it. What must be noted is that only the state of the right ear matters. That you should have an excellent left ear will be of no use to you in singing in tune…
A. G.: Why is that?
A. T.: The explanation is complex. Let us simply say that through the right ear, one hears oneself in a much more immediate way than through the left.
Hearing the melody “in one’s head”
A. G.: It happens to many people that they hear a melody very clearly “in their head” without being able to reproduce it vocally. Tell us about this phenomenon.
A. T.: Let us begin, if you will, with the subject who cannot even register the melody in his head. He owes this deficiency to his ear, which is probably linear up to 500 hertz: you can pass the melody to him five thousand times, he will only hear noise or a vague rhythmic succession. By contrast, he who already manages to obtain the melody within him hears at least up to 500 hertz. The trouble is that to reproduce it, he must also hear the upper harmonic!
Thus, I am persuaded, for my part, that to sing or to be a musician is to modulate on 2,000 hertz, which is the real zero. The important thing is the zone of the audiometric curve that lies between 800 and 2,000 or 3,000 hertz. The tenor sings in this zone, the baritone also, with added low frequencies. The bass himself sings there, descending lower still than the baritone. One commits an enormous error in imagining that the bass sings only in the low zone. In reality, these three types of voice have as many high harmonics as one another.
Self-listening, more complex than it appears
A. G.: You profess that the voice reproduces only what the ear hears, but this in no way means that the subject can emit all that he hears?
A. T.: Indeed, for a good emission requires not only good listening, but good self-listening. Now this self-listening does not happen automatically: it requires an extremely refined control. What makes us believe that, in a great singer, the process triggers and unfolds automatically is only that it takes place much faster in him than in us, owing to the habits acquired in the daily work of singing.
Caruso and his one-metre-forty thorax
A. G.: The interest is therefore considerable in studying the frequency bands of great singers?
A. T.: Absolutely, for when one can know the passband of one of them, one knows at the same time all kinds of very interesting things, such as the mode of self-control or the technique of the singer in question. One knows for example that Caruso had an extremely dilated thorax. The complete easing of his tympanum implied a total relaxation of his larynx: he could thus make his entire chest sing, the girth of which, let me remind you, measured one metre forty! He had only four litres of current air, whereas others have up to ten litres!
The photography of the voice
A. G.: In this research, you were greatly helped, I believe, by the fact that it became possible for you to take what you call in one of your books “photographs of the voice”?
A. T.: Indeed. There exist analysers that allow sounds to be decomposed as the prism manages to disperse light in a spectral rainbow. Thanks to them, one can capture a sound, project it on a cathode tube and study its different elements.
There are nowadays panoramic analysers that visualise the different frequencies of sounds, quantitatively respecting the relative values of each. There are also sonagraphs that are even more complete: they make it possible to inscribe the different characteristics of a phrase of a duration of 2.4 seconds, individualising each of the elements in frequency, intensity and duration. The inscription is done on a special paper charged with gunpowder, which a needle brought to red-heat attacks at the presence of a frequency.
Twenty-five years ago, when I was interested in the professionals of the voice, the analyser did not exist, and I had to tinker with one myself. What is curious is that once it was out of service, I could not find on the market a single one that would render me equivalent services. My analyser, which was a hand apparatus, combined on filters in series, allowed me to make strange observations. Thus, I thought at the outset that the voice was going to climb very high, to 50,000 hertz! Yet I realised that the most beautiful voices hardly exceeded 7,000 hertz. Caruso, all the same, had a spray that climbed towards 8,000 hertz, a spray that I have observed in no other singer…
The Caruso hypothesis: became Caruso by chance
The quality of Caruso is that there was always at least 18 decibels per octave of fall after 2,000 hertz, towards the low frequencies. He therefore had an extraordinary filter that made me say he had an ear resembling that of a tubal catarrh. My hypothesis was that he must have been deaf, or that some drama had occurred.
Caruso only had the voice that earned him his glory from around 1902-1903. Now, one sees in his biography that in 1901 or 1902, he underwent in Spain a surgical intervention on the right side of the face. It was then that something must have happened: either his external auditory canal was damaged, or his Eustachian tube was — in any event, this made him Caruso suddenly! I had the chance to treat three people who had sung with him: all confided to me that in town, he asked them to place themselves on his left, because he did not hear on the right side. In other words, Caruso deserved no credit for singing well, for he no longer heard anything but song!
When one singer hated another
A. G.: Conversely, the ears of any and everybody are not made to appreciate Carusian singing!
A. T.: So true is this that I knew a very great singer, whose name you will allow me to keep silent, since he is still living, who, all rivalry aside, could absolutely not understand why Caruso had had such prestige. I played him the most beautiful Caruso record, Macbeth, recorded in 1913. He flew into a rage: “I shall never understand that this fellow went round the world!”. I studied his hearing, then I fabricated a filter to hear like him: in my turn, I could not bear Caruso, who had become inaudible. The explanation is that this singer and Caruso heard in diametrically opposed ways. This is moreover what happens fairly often between a singing teacher and his pupil, and the drama is that in a few lessons, one can literally “break” a being to the point where they can no longer even speak!
Learning to sing with the Electronic Ear
A. G.: You are the inventor of a method of vocal conditioning: if I come to see you, will you make me sing well?
A. T.: Surely. I shall make you sing well in the sense that I will give you the technique, the Carusian technique if you like. Obviously, I shall not be able to change much, or very little, in your muscular and bone dispositions! Everyone can sing…
A. G.: The record companies would therefore have an interest in calling on you!
A. T.: I can tell you that a certain number of recordings have already been made with the help of the Electronic Ear. The machine is set going: the singer can no longer produce a single sound that he does not control… In the abbeys, my machines allow the monks to sing Gregorian in a month and a half, whereas otherwise three or four years are required. Gregorian is very difficult, because all the sounds are outside the usual norms.
Education through singing at school
A. G.: To return to what you were saying at the beginning, a subject who sings very badly or who cannot sing is, in a way, a child-singer who has turned out badly. What is to be done, at school level in particular, to remedy this aberrant evolution?
A. T.: The answer is simple: take the child very early and make him sing. Make him sing intelligent things, naturally. And above all, give him an excellent teacher. If the one who makes him sing does not himself attain a satisfactory control, it is obvious that one is heading for catastrophe. What one can do, for example, is to have a whole group conducted by a member of that group who naturally sings very well: the results are generally excellent.
In any case, this type of education is essential, for in neglecting it, one is in the process of losing one of the most extraordinary jewels of the dynamic of a being. Do not forget this rule: the better one is in one’s skin, the more one wants to sing; and the more one sings, the better one feels.
A. G.: You protest, then, against those who make singing simply a leisure activity among others?
A. T.: Singing is a dynamic activity essential to the equilibrium of a being. As such, one cannot treat it with too much seriousness and attention.
Place of this interview in the series
This interview is the seventh 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, see the mother-article of the series.
Source: Alain Gerber, “The singing voice — Alfred A. Tomatis: Caruso became Caruso by chance”, SON Magazine no. 36, Paris, March 1973. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.