Tomatis — An Experience to Share

English translation in preparation of the book published in Saragossa in 2017 under the title “Tomatís, una experiencia para compartir — Aproximación a la Audio-Psico-Fonología” (204 pages, ISBN 978-84-943988-0-3). The book grew out of the meeting, in Saragossa, between Juan Antonio Timor Pineda — educator, Master of Letters, practitioner of the Tomatis method for more than three decades — and Chaime Marcuello Servós, professor of sociology at the University of Saragossa and father of Luis, born with Down syndrome, whose accompaniment through the method is the trigger for the project. Foreword by Dr José Mombiela Sanz, functional neurologist. Contribution by Christophe Besson on the genesis and evolution of the Electronic Ear, dated Neuchâtel, September 2013. The French version is made available here in its working draft (v12); the English translation follows.

“We are two. […] These two points of view, that of the expert and that of the beneficiary, here cross, answer one another, complement one another. It is precisely this twofold voice that constitutes the singularity of this book.”

— Juan Antonio Timor Pineda and Chaime Marcuello Servós, Chapter 1

Presentation

The book takes the rare wager of a writing in two voices between the one who has practised the method for thirty years and the one who benefits from it as a father. Timor is the expert: he knows the machines, the protocols, the listening test, the history of audio-psycho-phonology. Marcuello is the father: he discovered the method because his wife followed sessions during pregnancy to prepare for the birth, and because from the very first months of Luis’s life — diagnosed in utero with Down syndrome — the couple set out in search of everything that could help their child. The writing begins when Luis is three and a half; he is today more than seven.

“The trigger was Luis”, the authors write. And further on: “It is too early to draw definitive conclusions on the long-term benefits of the method. But certain correlations are clear enough to deserve being named: the improvement of his muscle tone, his progress in communication, the evolution of his capacity to enter into relation with others. Scientific prudence invites us to set these links to one side. But human experience makes them hard to ignore.”

To this singularity of method — the constant back-and-forth between expert and beneficiary, the aspiration “to recount, to bear witness, to set into narrative” rather than to draft a treatise — is added a particular attention to fields often neglected by the method: Down syndrome, the musical ear, the integration of languages, sleep disorders (“when the night becomes an enemy”), Ménière’s syndrome, the dialogue with Hildegardian medicine.

The foreword by Dr José Mombiela Sanz

The work opens on the voice of a Spanish functional neurologist, Dr José Mombiela Sanz, who situates the method from the outset within the contemporary medical field:

“From the standpoint of functional neurology, having access to the technique developed by Dr Alfred Tomatis has represented — and still represents today — a precious aid for all children and adults likely to benefit from it. And all the more so for the mother-baby relation throughout the nine months that gestation lasts.”

Mombiela inscribes Tomatis’s work within the perspective of the three years that the human brain takes to constitute itself as an organised neural network. He insists that “Tomatis’s psycho-phono-auditory technique […] intervenes upon a system of networks of neural networks; its effect is comparable to that of a domino piece that knocks others down: it triggers a cascade of regulations that improve the global functioning. It is precious in prevention, and more precious still in complementarity with other specialists.” And he concludes: “This technique is alive. Not to know it is to reduce by so much the therapeutic options available.”

Christophe Besson’s contribution: Genesis and evolution of the Electronic Ear

Christophe Besson signs one of the most precious chapters of the work — an illustrated technical history of the Electronic Ear from 1965 to the present day, with colour photographs of each generation of machine. One traverses there:

The 1965 Electronic Ear — microphone and tape-recorder inputs, delay, gating, C1/C2, air conduction, balance and bone conduction.
The international network (1976–1982) — Madrid, Geneva, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal; the passage from valves to transistors with Ed Agnew in Toronto, the introduction of the precession parameter (“that time of vestibulo-cochlear preparation that precedes the act of listening, the response to the desire to listen that mobilises the whole body before the sound even arrives”).
The EE3PFR2 (1988) — the machine most often depicted in the Tomatissian literature, the first to bring together all the treatments without any additional accessory.
1992 — Acoustic System Besson SA in Neuchâtel: Tomatis entrusts the manufacture of all his products to Christophe Besson, barely out of his studies. The A1 comes out the same year.
1995–2004 — The NewTec and the difficult years: an analogue machine with infinite response “very close to the physiology of the human ear”, developed thanks to the digital research work with the University of Gdańsk and the Institute of Microtechnology of Neuchâtel. “Tomatis died in Carcassonne at the end of December 2001. From that moment on, I found myself almost alone in producing these extraordinary machines.”
2004 — The unannounced visit of Juan Antonio Timor: “In 2004, the unannounced visit of Juan Antonio Timor — who had come from Saragossa to Neuchâtel in a van with his wife and his daughters to persuade me not to give up — changed everything.” It was this visit that relaunched the full production from September 2004 onwards: N425, N426, N430, then today the Series 7 (model N727 with a microprocessor architecture and an OLED screen).

The chapter is signed “Christophe Besson, Neuchâtel, September 2013”. It sketches in the background a twenty-year friendship between the Swiss horologist and the Spanish educator — without which, no doubt, the production of the original Electronic Ears would have disappeared along with their inventor.

Foreword — Dr José Mombiela Sanz.
Chapter 1 — Aim and Method: Our approach; A method of work.
Chapter 2 — Our Experience: Our first contacts with the method; The arrival of Cuca — and of a world that shifts; Ángel and Oroel — the journal of the first sessions.
Chapter 3 — Discovering Tomatis and his Method: Listening, hearing, perceiving; The ear, the hair cell and the foundations of the method; The three functions of the ear.
Chapter 4 — The listening of life: The sound that builds us; The listening test — “to read an ear as one reads a life”; The Electronic Ear.
Chapter 5 — Other applications and their results: The integration of languages; The musical ear; Ménière’s syndrome; Down syndrome; When the night becomes an enemy; Synergies and complementary therapies.
Chapter 6 — Knowing how to listen, learning to listen: Listening begins with oneself; From sound to meaning; Hildegard and Tomatis — eight centuries apart, the same intuition; Learning to listen, a lifelong task.
Genesis and evolution of the Electronic Ear — Christophe Besson.
Epilogue — Hildegard of Bingen and the six golden rules of Dr Strehlow.
Glossary — audio-psycho-phonology explained term by term (audio-psycho-phonology; gating; channel 1 / channel 2; hair cell; cochlea; air and bone conduction; envelope curve / ethnogram; right auditory dominance; neurological engram; dynamogenic and vestibular functions; acoustic impedance; integration of an idiom; auditory laterality; law of remanence…).
Bibliography of Alfred Tomatis’s works.

Place in the network

The book belongs to the lineage of introductions to the Method signed by former pupils or collaborators — in the same vein as L’écoute, c’est la vie by Patrick Dumas de la Roque or Listening for Wellness by Pierre Sollier. It is distinguished from them by three features:

The dual signature practitioner / beneficiary, which gives the whole a flesh that purely didactic works do not have.
The Spanish anchoring: all the clinical narrative unfolds in Spain, in Saragossa, with children’s first names (Luis, Cuca, Ángel, Oroel) that recall the existence of a living Spanish-speaking Tomatis network, still poorly documented in English.
The place given to the technical genealogy of the Electronic Ear by Christophe Besson — a narrative one finds nowhere else in this form, and which illuminates both the engineering rigour of the Besson of Switzerland lineage and the fragility of a transmission that nearly died out in 2004.

In brief

An engaging manuscript, still in progress, that usefully complements the bibliography of the method. To be recommended in priority to parents of children with Down syndrome or with developmental disorders, to Spanish-speaking and French-speaking practitioners of the network, to historians of techniques (for the Besson chapter), and to every reader sensitive to the intellectual adventure of a method that has been transmitted from witness to witness for more than sixty years. The final rapprochement between Tomatis and Hildegard of Bingen — “eight centuries apart, the same intuition” — opens a fertile spiritual perspective, in the lineage of Alfred Tomatis’s late writings.

Juan Antonio Timor Pineda and Chaime Marcuello Servós, with the contribution of Christophe Besson. Foreword by Dr José Mombiela Sanz.

Original Spanish edition: Tomatís, una experiencia para compartir — Aproximación a la Audio-Psico-Fonología, Sibirana Ediciones, Saragossa, 2017, 204 pages, ISBN 978-84-943988-0-3. The French translation is made available here in its working draft (v12), pending completion — publisher and date of publication not yet fixed.