Deafness: two complementary approaches

The re-education of deafness is the domain in which Tomatis and Guberina meet most closely. Two methods, one shared objective: to restore communication.

Re-educating deafness: when Tomatis and Guberina meet

The re-education of deafness is one of the domains in which the Tomatis and verbo-tonal methods meet most clearly. Two different approaches, but a single shared objective: to enable the hearing-impaired to recover effective communication.

Two identical observations

Tomatis, in examining singers who “sang out of tune”, discovered that their ears presented auditory deficits similar to those of workers exposed to the noise of aircraft jet engines. Conclusion: “The voice contains only the harmonics that the ear can hear”.

Guberina, working with profoundly deaf children from 1957 onwards, observed that these children “heard with the brain” rather than with the ear. He developed “verbo-tonal audiometry” to evaluate not only hearing, but the global perception of sounds.

Deafness is not merely a problem of volume

The two researchers understood that deafness is not only a question of sound volume. It is a problem of perception: the brain does not receive the right information, or does not know how to interpret it.

Tomatis distinguished “hearing” (a passive function) from “listening” (an active function). A deaf person may hear without listening. Re-education therefore consists in “awakening” the function of listening, not only in amplifying sounds.

Guberina, in his practice, observed that profoundly deaf children could understand speech when work was done on the optimal frequencies of each sound. Deafness was therefore not a fatality, but a problem of perception which could be corrected.

Two complementary approaches

The Tomatis method uses filtered music (Mozart, Gregorian chant, the maternal voice) to stimulate the inner ear and “recharge” the cortex. The emphasis is placed on the high frequencies, which stimulate the brain and provide energy.

The verbo-tonal method uses the SUVAG apparatuses to work on the optimal frequencies of each sound of speech. The emphasis is placed on phonetic correction and the learning of languages.

These two approaches complement one another wonderfully: Tomatis works on the overall “charge” of the ear, while Guberina refines the perception of each specific sound.

A shared hope for the deaf

Both methods have enabled thousands of profoundly deaf subjects to recover effective communication. This is not a “miracle”, but the result of a profound understanding of the workings of the ear and the brain.

As Guberina put it: “The verbo-tonal is therefore not a system as one ordinarily hears it: providing a more or less happy solution to concrete problems. What saves it from this peril is that it presents itself as a global and structured way of conceiving of hearing and the brain in their functioning.”

Tomatis could have said exactly the same of his own method.