"Sounds and Architecture" (SON Magazine no. 88, December 1977)

Fifteenth and last interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 88, December 1977, Tomatis takes up the sound architecture of dwelling places and religious edifices. His thesis: our modern flats “literally assassinate the subject” by devouring sounds through excess of insulation. He denounces the “soft cheese” walls covered with carpet that render inaudible the voice of self, defends verticality through the call of high frequencies towards the ceiling (the reason why “nuns sing like angels in cathedrals but shout themselves hoarse in low chapels”), and recounts the ancient architects who sealed amphorae in the walls of churches to dephase the low frequencies and reinforce the high ones — holes today plugged up.

“SON” Magazine — no. 88 — December 1977
Sounds and Architecture
Alfred A. TOMATIS
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber

Architectural acoustics, a vital question

Alain Gerber: Professor Tomatis, you know that many people, when they speak of acoustics, give this term the restricted meaning of acoustics of halls, or architectural acoustics. You who treat acoustics as a whole, have you had the opportunity to take a close interest in this particular question?

Alfred Tomatis: Yes. It was, moreover, inevitable, for it is an important dimension of the general acoustic problem. One touches indeed on a vital question, in the proper sense of the term. Under what conditions is a subject going to live with himself? Here is the real problem that arises when one approaches the relations between architecture and acoustics.

A. G.: It is in sum a matter of the quality of life, but at a fundamental level, and not superficially, as many people imagine?

A. T.: Exactly. One must never lose sight of the fact that man is a “sound animal”. To know in what jar one is going to place him should be a preoccupation of first urgency. Alas! it is nothing of the sort. The tendency is, on the contrary, to pile people up in these standardised sardine cans that are rooms possessing a fourth dimension, invisible but oh how perceptible, which is precisely the sonic dimension. You now know all that I place in this word: in sound — as I understand it — it is the whole psyche that finds itself implicated, so that the walls must be built in such a way as to reflect, in the acoustic order, a part of the being who inhabits them. One sees that it is a question of something quite other than a simple requirement of comfort!

The unconscious conflict: uterine regression or energising?

A. G.: But if there is here a vital need, why does it not translate itself spontaneously into architectural realisations?

A. T.: Going to the bottom of things, one notices that there is in truth, in the unconscious of man, a conflict of interest. No doubt, the subject feels the need to be energised by the sounds he emits. But on the other hand, he tends to find again his first envelope, that within which he felt so well when he was still in the mother’s womb. Now, as I have already told you, to this period of existential nirvana corresponds a period of lesser acoustic sensitivity (for a long time, it was even believed that the embryo heard nothing, an opinion whose falsity has been demonstrated). Something pushes us to return to this stage of low acoustic energising. To yield to this inclination, however, is to slide down the slope of regression. It is to let the prey go for the shadow, that is to say to prevent oneself from growing in one’s dimension as a man in order to recover pleasant memories.

The unconscious conflict that I evoked above may in sum be summarised as a struggle between, on the one hand, a desire to sink into that deep, soft armchair that the past holds out to us (so deep that we end up no longer being able to extricate ourselves from it) and, on the other hand, the vocation towards the dynamic of life that will allow us a better elaboration of our cortex.

A. G.: It is necessary, according to you, that this vocation should prevail?

A. T.: Indeed. For the brain of a subject to become truly human, it must enter the conscious field. And for it to enter the conscious field, there must be an energetic excitation at the level of the encephalic apparatus. This excitation is at the origin of all creativity.

The flats that assassinate

A. G.: Now, you profess, sounds constitute notorious providers of this excitation…

A. T.: Exactly. And that is why the acoustics of a flat are far more important than, for example, its orientation or the rational distribution of the rooms. There exist buildings that literally assassinate the subject. Why? Because they devour the sounds which, thus, are no longer in sufficient quantity to recharge the cortex in a satisfactory way.

A. G.: Does this mean that one goes too far in sound insulation?

A. T.: Of course! It is very fine to campaign against sound pollution. But this is to forget that sound makes us live! Noise itself, so decried, is not something entirely negative. All these refrains that are being pushed on us currently about the misdeeds of “sound aggressions” risk having very harmful consequences. Besides, they already have. I personally know several cases of persons victims — I say indeed victims — of soundproofing. If one continues in this direction, one will have more and more people suffering from a lack of sound, exactly as others may suffer from a lack of oxygen.

Energising high-frequency sounds vs exhausting low-frequency sounds

A. G.: Sounds form an abundant and varied universe. Are they all equally beneficial for cortical recharge?

A. T.: The question must be posed differently. Strictly speaking, it is not this or that sound that is harmful or beneficial, but this or that part of the sound. Like air, sound is a composition of distinct elements. The high elements (above 8,000 hertz) are active and participate first and foremost in the energising of the one who perceives them. The low elements, on the other hand, will mobilise energy without collaborating in the recharge. It is they, for example, that virtually oblige an individual to dance, to enter into a trance, etc. They determine an engagement of the body that is very costly from the point of view of energy, and which they are incapable of compensating elsewhere.

A. G.: The apparent energising they provoke is in fact an energetic impoverishment?

A. T.: Yes, because it is addressed to the body without being applied to the brain. The agitation of the body empties the batteries that nothing else allows to be recharged.

The ideal room and the non-parallel walls

A. G.: Concretely, what does the ideal room look like?

A. T.: A few years ago, I posed the problem in connection with a re-education cabin, which I wanted to have built entirely of glass (the advantage was twofold: we could follow the subject, and he himself did not feel in a state of claustration). The prototype developed by Saint-Gobain according to my calculations presented two major defects: on the one hand, it was prohibitively expensive; on the other, the reverberation time was much too long (two seconds minimum for the slightest finger snap performed inside the cabin!). The walls of the latter were rigorously parallel: that is where the error lay! This parallelism that I had sought was precisely the thing to avoid.

Indeed, I was to realise subsequently that this fundamental principle was well known to the ancient architects. Examine closely the most famous constructions of past centuries: you will observe that one deliberately broke the parallelism of the walls — and this for the obvious purpose of attenuating reverberation.

A. G.: However, you said earlier that this reverberation constitutes a quasi-vital need, insofar as it allows the human being to reflect himself acoustically in his milieu?

A. T.: Certainly. But one must clearly understand that this need is satisfied by a certain threshold of reverberation. Beyond it, the phenomenon becomes troublesome by reason of the sonic parasiting it causes.

The sonic radar: the child who hums in the dark

A. G.: What must be remembered is that sound makes us live?

A. T.: Absolutely. Like the bat, though to a much lesser degree, we possess a sonic radar: when we emit a sound, it is reflected on something and comes back to us. In this way, everything we let out reinforces the consciousness we have of our own existence. It makes us live insofar as it confirms to us that we are alive.

Do not ask yourself any longer why the child afraid in the dark begins to make noise, to hum or to whistle: it is obviously because he feels himself to exist, to live, through the sounds he emits and which return to him! In the same way, the right method for becoming aware of one’s body is to plunge it into water. In a sonic bath, we experience the resistance, the opacity, the massiveness of our being.

From there, one understands that any absence of acoustic reverberation — those who have had the opportunity to walk at night in the desert know this well (or those who, more prosaically, walk by day in an anechoic chamber, Ed.) — is felt by the subject as anxiety-provoking. We need an echo in order to live, and to this extent, I repeat, rooms that are too soundproofed are extremely unhealthy. The multiplication of dead walls, to which we are witnessing today, is a non-sense. On the contrary, care should be taken to ensure that all the walls are sufficiently reverberant.

The real problem: isolating from the neighbour without stifling one’s own voice

A. G.: Is it not desirable, on the other hand, to be protected from outside noises?

A. T.: Yes. The great problem is precisely to find a system that isolates us from these (television of the neighbours, children galloping in the staircase, etc.) while guaranteeing the reverberation of our own sounds. The current tendency is to do exactly the opposite: the walls are of soft cheese, but covered with carpet (as are the ceilings). Result: one literally no longer hears oneself! But this in no way prevents enjoying the marital scenes that are taking place in the flat next door, or even several floors below (the plumbing, as is well known, constitutes an excellent sonic conductor!).

Without wishing to dramatise this question, I think that it is not entirely by chance if so many psychiatric dispensaries open up in the vicinity of large housing estates. The architecture of the latter, from every point of view, seems to have been designed to compromise the psycho-affective equilibrium of their occupants.

No carpet on the ceiling!

A. G.: You will be told that rational soundproofing is expensive…

A. T.: That is indeed what one is always told, but it is false. It is not a question of price, it is a question of information of the architects and of well-conducted studies. To tell you to what point architects are little sensitised to these problems, I know a renowned one who is very proud to show his guests how he has arranged his office: highly reverberant covering on the floor, carpet on the walls and on the ceiling. It is exactly the opposite of what should be done! One can very well put carpet on the floor, but one must on no account put any on the side walls, and still less on the ceiling!

A. G.: Why still less?

A. T.: Because the individual is all the more called to his own verticality in that the high-frequency sounds catch hold of him in the upper part. This means that the becoming-aware of self through the reverberation of the sounds one emits is all the more “successful” in that this reverberation is ensured by the ceiling.

A. G.: What happens when this is not the case?

A. T.: There is no longer a call towards the top, and — to use a vivid image — your ears begin to resemble those of hunting dogs!

Why one sings like an angel in cathedrals

Why is verticality so easy in cathedrals? Precisely because one finds there this call of sound towards the top — the ogive implying a second centre of sonic gravity that “attracts” in a way the first. It is characteristic that nuns who, in such places, have voices of angels, shout themselves hoarse to no result when they transport themselves to a chapel with a very low ceiling. With a wall just above the head, it is impossible to sing well: there again, the ears are pinned down and audio-phonatory self-control can no longer be accomplished.

When we sing inside a building, the architecture of the latter is our musical instrument. The Ancients knew this very well. On various occasions, I have been asked to take measurements in abbeys to determine the ideal location of the stalls where the monks pray and sing: each time, the places I designated were the very ones where the stalls had been installed at the origin.

The amphorae concealed in the walls of churches

There is thus, concerning architectural acoustics, a whole knowledge that is being lost. I shall give as proof the following little story. In all old churches, one could identify in the walls at certain places, notably around the paintings that were hung on them, a certain number of holes. If a section of the wall had been made at this level, one would have found, set in the wall, amphorae. These amphorae make possible a dephasing of the low-frequency sounds that annihilates them, which amounts to a reinforcement of the high frequencies. Go to these churches today: you will observe that all the holes have been plugged up!

— Alain GERBER

Bibliography of Alfred A. Tomatis (at the end of the series)

L’OREILLE ET LE LANGAGE — Éditions du Seuil, Collection Microcosme “Le Rayon de la Science” 17, 190 pp. illustr., 1963.
ÉDUCATION ET DYSLEXIE — Éditions ESF, Collection “Science de l’Éducation”, 200 pp., 1972.
LA LIBÉRATION D’ŒDIPE or De la Communication intra-utérine au langage humain — Éditions ESF, Collection “Science de l’Éducation”, 180 pp., 1972.
Volume 1: Qu’est-ce que l’écoute humaine ? — 172 pp. illustr., 1974.
Volume 2: Qu’est-ce que l’oreille humaine ? — 184 pp. illustr., 1974.
Éditions ESF, Collection “Science de l’Éducation”.

Place of this interview in the series

This interview is the fifteenth and last of the Gerber × Tomatis series published monthly in SON Magazine from September 1972 to December 1977. For the complete contents, see the mother-article of the series.

Source: Alain Gerber, “Sounds and Architecture — Alfred A. Tomatis”, SON Magazine no. 88, Paris, December 1977. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.