Born on a New Year’s Day in 1920 in a nice French town called Nice, Alfred Tomatis started his career as an ENT specialist. He, however, took keen interest in studying the impact of occupational noise on humans. This paved the way for a new multi-disciplinary science, called audio-psycho-phonology (APP). It explains why the way one listens makes a profound impact on his personality.
As an ENT specialist, Tomatis knew that the human experience of listening is not only with the ears, but also with the body. The human bones, unlike the middle ear, which are the good sound conductors, transmit the sounds straight to inner ears.
On the other hand, sounds transmitted through the middle-ear are controlled as the middle ear acts as a gate-keeper: as certain sounds get amplified, some get muffled to the background. This results in our ability to focus on what is relevant or important.
Due to the influence of his father, who was a professional opera singer, Tomatis undertook a study to know why most of the professional opera singers turn out to be deaf in the course of their career. He found that deafness was the fall-out of their profession. While singing at very high pitch and too loudly, there was every possibility of damaging their ears. More specifically, it was found that the singers developed deafness for selected frequencies in the sound range around 2000 Hz. He also noticed that their voices too lacked the frequencies around 2000 Hz. Known as the First Law of Tomatis, this discovery had far-reaching implications in changing the lives of so many people.
In yet another experiment, Tomatis blocked the ears of a famous singer, letting through only certain selected sound frequencies.
Almost immediately, the voice of the singer deteriorated. It was also found that the “blocked frequencies” too disappeared from his voice. Based on this observation, Tomatis postulated his Second Law, according to which by modifying one’s hearing, one could change the voice of an individual.
He found an inbuilt defence mechanism in the body that protects the inner ears by making the middle ear muscles flabby. This flabbiness in the middle ear automatically prevents the entry of the loud noise into the inner ear. He also was aware that the root cause for many learning problems lay in not listening to certain frequencies.
This mechanism made him believe and experiment on restoration of voice and hearing capacity by retraining these muscles in the middle ear. This came to be known as the Third Law of Tomatis.
The question now was though we knew that muscles could be made stronger, how to go about training the two smallest muscles in the mid ear? After several experiments and trial and error investigations, Tomatis came across the fact that these two muscles could be strengthened by having someone repeatedly listen to “music” that is switched on and off continuously. The muscles were to follow by stretching and relaxing, as over a period, they became stronger.
His first prototype thus used an old-fashioned sewing machine to switch the sounds on and off. Later it was found that one could make faster progress if the music would not be switched on and off, but be switched between two channels: one in which the low frequencies are amplified, and another in which the high frequencies are amplified. Called `gating’, this became one of the functions of a machine he developed, which was called an `electronic ear’.
If listening was key to learning, perceiving all the frequencies of the auditory spectrum well was equally essential. Based on several experiments, Tomatis came to the conclusion that people with an “ideal listening curve” learn more easily than those who have a distorted curve. Thus, to improve someone’s listening curve, he advocated a dose of gated music that is filtered. In other words, by letting only certain frequencies through, he could train selectively those parts of the listening curve that needed to be strengthened.
As a result, people started to listen predominantly with their ears and it was found that their behaviour problems could be overcome, as the performance in school could be improved.
The idea that listening is key to learning opened a whole new area of research. He also found that people who are right-ear dominant learn much more easily. His background in neurology made him understand why. The right ear, which is connected to the left brain — the region assigned to language processing helped in having a fast and accurate connection.
The left ear is connected to the right brain, where language cannot be processed. The sound input, therefore, has to enter into the left brain for processing via the corpus callosum, which is not only a slower connection, but also less reliable. In this way some of the higher frequencies, which are important in language processing, get lost, affecting accuracy in interpreting language.
For example, a “b” and a “p” only differ in the higher harmonics and someone who is left ear dominant thus has to guess from the context what was said. Tomatis, therefore, made a modification in his ‘electronic car’ to enable people to become right-ear dominant.
Tomatis was aware of the fact that each language predominantly uses a set of frequencies, which are different from other languages.
For example, the French language uses mainly frequencies between 1,000 and 2,000 Hz and hence the. French ears are thus accustomed to them. However, the Britishers who are accustomed to frequencies between 2,000 and 12,000 Hz become “deaf” to the French sounds (and vice-versa). This is the reason for the difficulties in learning any foreign language. Tomatis found that one can train the ear to get accustomed to those foreign frequencies, so as to learn a foreign language without tears. This would mean that in order to learn, one should be able to listen!
He also realised that high frequencies transmit more information to the brain, thereby stimulating it more.
In the ear too, there are many more receptors (Corti cells) for high pitch tones than for lower ones. According to Tomatis, ears are like dynamo, which with high pitch sounds can stimulate the brain, thus resulting in more energy.
The Tomatis Listening Therapy has helped people of all ages variously. Children and adults with auditory processing problems, dyslexia, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, autism, and those with sensory integration and motor-skill difficulties could overcome their problems with sounds of music.
It has also helped adults fight depression, learn foreign languages faster, develop better communication skills, and improve both creativity and on the job performance. Many musicians, singers and actors (like the giant super star of the French Cinema, Gerard Depardieu) have all found such music helpful in finetuning their artistic skills.
Tomatis has written extensively. Unfortunately, out of 14 books only three are available and are translated into English. Nada Centre of Music Therapy, Chennai (India) is all set to get the remaining books translated for the English-reading public.
This article was published in Bhavan’s Journal June 2008 pages 87 to 90
Edited by Geeta Shreedar, July 16, 2021