Medical, Psychological and Pedagogical Aspects of Audio-Psycho-Phonology
Here is an entire world that I wish to explore in your company. More than that — these are two universes that I must illuminate in their reciprocal interweaving.
I suspect that many of you are encountering for the first time the field known as Audio-Psycho-Phonology. An introduction therefore seems necessary. It will be brief (concise of necessity), but it will allow me to hand out a few fundamental pieces of information, indispensable for understanding the lectures and works to follow, without (I trust) wearying those who are already conversant with our field.
We might thus define — in the broadest sense — Audio-Psycho-Phonology as an opening, through an auditory breach, towards the universe of language, grasped from the angle of its psychological function. This approach, new to many, is nonetheless well structured and firmly enough rooted to take its place among the fields already in existence.
In more practical terms, we shall say that Audio-Psycho-Phonology establishes itself as a pedagogy of listening — one of the most necessary, and certainly the most neglected.
It is to answer this need and to remedy this oversight that our field has worked out its most essential foundations. To speak of listening is no easy matter, however — for everyone claims to be endowed with this exceptional function. And yet, with time and an experience now of thirty years, it seems to me that it is precisely in this direction (namely in the realisation of this function) that we are most impaired. At most we might suggest that, in the course of his existence, man ascends successive rungs that will make of him a truly human being, meeting himself as he enters into the functional structure of listening.
The more one knows how — with resignation and humility — to lend an ear to that call, the greater becomes one’s openness to others, to one’s surroundings, to the universe — and ultimately to oneself.
Just as maieutics does, Audio-Psycho-Phonology proposes to undertake such a journey, whether for those who lose their way in their existential course, or for those who close themselves off from such an approach, or finally for those who have no perception whatever of the world of communication. To the first, then, we shall offer pedagogical help; to the second, psychological support; and for the third, we shall try to prevent entry into the world of alienation.
Audio-Psycho-Phonology carries within its teaching two seemingly distinct subjects: one concerns the evolution from hearing towards listening, the other the process that leads from babbling towards the expression of consciousness itself. In reality, for one who knows how to rise and gain sufficient distance, these two aspects soon unite into a single notion.
The objectification thus obtained reveals indeed that it is one and the same being.
Our audio-psycho-phonological approach prompts us to stress that the very structure of thought, established preverbally, has the human body at its disposal in order to express itself — in the literal sense, that is to say, in the mode of a true secretion, a verbal exudation.
What interests us is in reality the use of the nervous system by this preverbal structure — a use that we wish to awaken, to set in motion. And, using a term from the analytically inclined psychological jargon, we shall say that we seek to arouse the desire for communication. This desire is, beyond doubt — in our understanding — the keystone of the whole linguistic, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic edifice.
This desire for communication, inscribed in the evolutionary programme, can manifest itself according to the phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes of the ear, grasped in its totality. Indeed, does not this primitive, fundamental memory reveal (when we recall that desiderium, the root of the word desire, means the search for something already experienced) the inductive influence of language in the evolution leading towards the human structure?
The whole of audio-psycho-phonological science rests on this knowledge. What it can offer in return — if it may be put thus — are the means to traverse or to retrace this journey, this phylogenetic or ontogenetic structural course, for those who have, in varying degrees, been made unable to accomplish it.
We see, then, how our field fits into all the human activities that, closely or remotely, touch upon listening, and consequently upon language. But to penetrate into all the activities of the human sciences does not for that reason mean to supplant them. To be engaged does not mean to replace. And it is precisely on this distinction — sometimes ill-defined, perhaps ill-conceived, and at times altogether absent — that misunderstandings arise, that fears take hold, that confusions about our techniques are perpetuated.
Audio-Psycho-Phonology replaces nothing. It adds a new dimension — a dimension of its own, strictly defined, which everyone can introduce into his own field. It is obvious, however, that if strict adherence to this knowledge, to this awareness in short, is not maintained, our field runs a risk — above all when it claims to act of its own accord, beyond what it is able to bring in terms of activating the potentials of the ear. Let me explain.
Each time one of us — an audio-psycho-phonologist, then — thinks he can himself teach the mother tongue or a foreign language, that he carries out the disentangling of some psychological problem, and all the more so when he believes himself capable of curing this or that ailment, he loses the object of his true vocation. And each time someone from outside attributes to him the qualities of a pedagogue, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst or the like — he is mistaken.
To be an audio-psycho-phonologist is to make possible the birth or rebirth, the development, the widening of the desire to listen — up to the establishment of the permanence of this function. Then the pedagogue will have before him avid ears; the psychologist will enter into a true relational dynamic, hitherto hidden and masked by underlying instinctual tensions; the physician, for his part, will see emerge the somatic investment of this or that psychic tension, or will readily discover the sources of the deep waves suddenly surging from an affective universe struck with impediment.
Thus Audio-Psycho-Phonology is, and must remain, a science in the service of the other human sciences — pedagogy, psychology and medicine in particular, as regards the subject of our gathering this evening. I understand that it is not easy to accept at once and with full conviction such notions. And yet so it is. And not only is it so, but — despite all the resistances that rise up to escape it — it cannot be otherwise.
What does this mean?
The ear — by which I mean that apparatus barely glimpsed through its pinna, unfolding elegantly like a question mark — the ear thus runs into the depths in a particularly complex and delicate manner, hard to grasp even (and perhaps above all) for the specialist. By “ear” I also mean all that is connected with it at the level of the nervous axis within the nervous system.
By reason of its anatomical position, thanks to its physiological activity and its function of listening, the ear becomes at once at the source of, and the very source of, the processes that it provokes, and by which it is induced. I gladly proclaim (but this binds only me) that it is language — in its high linguistic function — that leads the ear towards what it is. I also like to add that it is the ear that induces — in the embryological sense of the word — the brain into its characteristic structural dynamic.
Thus, stage by stage, onto physiology is grafted the structuring function of language, the latter itself resting upon the anatomical architecture. Under this aspect, which Audio-Psycho-Phonology handles daily, it is interesting to observe how a function newly created from scratch for the needs generated by communal life inclines the organism to adapt to mechanisms that nothing apparently allowed one to foresee. One need only weigh the example of writing and reading to verify the authenticity of these words.
So it is with the ear, so closely involved in the linguistic function. And yet the primitive, physiological capacities — often overlooked in the face of the emergence of the new usage imposed by the act of speech — remain operative. More than that: under good use, they will be perfected and brought to the summit of their efficiency.
What, then, are these primitive capacities?
Some are known, or at least perceived as such; others remain unknown and, as a result, unexploited in our physiological constructions. It is to the ear — in its vestibular part — that we owe the first labyrinthine mechanisms, which we group under the term equilibrium. But on closer inspection, from this notion of equilibrium there emerges the notion of a global grasp of the body thanks to the sensorimotor ensemble formed by the utricle, together with the semicircular canals, and by the saccule. This capacity to “take in hand” the body implies a tonic, living posture of the muscle, as well as a latent knowledge of its own sensation. This embryonic proprioceptive awareness crystallises all the more readily as the surrounding universe begins to exist through the sensory integration of sight, to which touch is joined. Then the being awakening within can locate itself within the universe that envelops it.
The grasping and understanding of this universe will be all the easier in proportion as the vestibulo-somatic territories, which we shall call “vestibular integrating fields”, are tuned, harmoniously coupled with the visual integrators, thanks to neurological ensembles meshing at several levels between the eye and the vestibule.
To the second storey — appearing phylogenetically later in the inner ear, namely the cochlea, and developed with a singular advance over the growth of the encephalon — falls the merit of establishing and introducing the function of language. This function, which we could not better designate than as the “cochleo-vestibular integrator”, will organise the coupling of the vestibulo-somatic integrator with the complex translating the cochleo-cortical functional reality and its temporo-ponto-cerebello-dento-rubro-thalamo-cortical responses. This last loop, somewhat discouraging for the uninitiated, reveals to us the total engagement of the body and of the encephalon through the projection of the cerebral cortex onto the cerebellum — which, meanwhile, thanks to the vestibulo-somatic ensemble, has already gathered the information emanating from the body.
What does this mean, fundamentally? It means that sound, word, sentence are not only received in the sense in which we picture it, as though the ear were a microphone, but integrated — that is to say, literally absorbed by the whole body and within the whole body. Thus the entire nervous axis is engaged in the act of speech, and memory itself is bodily incorporated, gesturally inscribed.
Audio-Psycho-Phonology concerns itself with the harmonisation of the various levels of integration we have just evoked. By ensuring the several coordinations, it allows the establishment of the bodily and postural constructions of good listening — a notion that no doubt requires to be better grasped. Hearing is, like sight, a phenomenon in which we can recognise degrees of permission, of consent. To hear remains still within the domain of the passive, whereas to listen implies an act of deliberately expressed assent.
In what way do we obtain these results? Thanks to electronic devices, one of which is named the Electronic Ear. Under this generic name, this device — it goes without saying — has undergone numerous modifications under the pressure of experimental research. Without entering for the moment into pure technique, we shall say that the Electronic Ear tends to behave like a “model” — or what we call a “simulator” — imitating the mechanism of the human ear. I do not know whether we have fully succeeded in this, so many are the mysteries the human ear still conceals; but what is certain is that, when we connect the presumed “model” in parallel with the hearing of the subject under examination, the experimental responses confirm that the human ear performs an adaptive action based on the proposed model.
The latter operates, in reality, on three parameters that we have, over time, recognised as essential and fundamental:
- the first answers to the width of the opening band of the auditory diaphragm;
- the second concerns the slopes that the envelope curves take within these passbands;
- the third, finally, answers to the accommodation time necessary for the auditory supply to prepare itself to fulfil the first two conditions — a time that we have named “latency time”.
At what level do we act?
Certainly at several levels.
One — the most mechanistic — consists in considering the accommodative adjustment at the level of the middle ear by simple muscular play: this cannot be contested.
Another — more physiological and more neglected, and the key to which was given us by the experience of dynamisation and well-being observed in persons after cures under the Electronic Ear — reveals that sounds have an undeniable dynamogenic effect. It is to this dimension that I alluded above, in saying that certain functions of the ear have been set aside from the physiological universe through ignorance. Now zoologists are perfectly familiar with the energising influence of the vestibular functions, and then the cochlear ones.
Today we know that, for the brain to be dynamic, active, it needs stimulation. Some maintain that it comes mainly from gravitational counter-reactions — which means for us that the labyrinth is here largely engaged. Others hold that it is chiefly a matter of the responses of musculo-articular sensation during movements — which means for us that the vestibule enters directly into this process; still others, such as ourselves for instance, speak of the possibility of stimulation by sounds — thus at the very level of the cochlea. In short, let each begin to enumerate one by one the various functions of human activity in the face of this cortical dynamisation — and he will be surprised at the significant share attributed to the inner ear.
This energising capacity is, of course, greatly diminished if the ear is little or ill used. Audio-Psycho-Phonology proposes to set in motion or to restore the action of this dynamising capacity within an educational path that engages, besides the Electronic Ear, a whole sound programming worked out as a function of the field in which the pedagogical, psychological or medical action takes place. This programming tends to follow the evolution of the genesis of the function of listening. It begins from the very first moments of the setting in motion of the auditory apparatus — that is to say, within intra-uterine life — and tends to reach, and then to pass beyond, the point where a “psychological” fixation seems to have arrested this march. The so-called “listening” tests inform us of the sites of these fixations and allow us to follow their resolution. They also give us the possibility of knowing and defining our action as well as our limits.
With Audio-Psycho-Phonology, we work no miracles, indeed. But we have today the certainty that we can bring effective help to the pedagogue as well as to the psychologist and the physician — up to the moment of obtaining a hearing wholly given over to Listening, together with a bodily dynamic centred upon language, into which is inscribed — in an altogether different perspective — what is in my view unfortunately called laterality.
This general view of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, with its medical-psycho-pedagogical connections, will moreover be presented to us in the actual experience — for our colleagues, the audio-psycho-phonologists, will introduce us into a universe that is at once ours, by belonging to this field, and theirs. Each of the speakers will, as early as tomorrow, allow us to benefit from his experience within his speciality — with regard to the dimension brought by the phenomena crystallised around Listening.
Besides, the density of the programme that announces itself will widen still further the field of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, for it will allow us to learn what our approach can bring to the psychiatrist, to the speech therapist, to the musician in particular, as well as to the specialist in applied linguistics.
Judging by the wealth of information received during the Toronto days devoted to dyslexia, I remain convinced that the matter will be fruitful — with the hope that it will open dialogue, so that our work may go forward, the sole and exclusive aspiration of which remains to bring help to that one among us who is in difficulty.
I allow you to catch your breath, so that tomorrow you may return at our side with ears open and Listening. And it is precisely because you will have listened to us that we shall know how to understand one another.
Alfred A. TOMATIS
President of the International Association of Audio-Psycho-Phonology
Inaugural lecture at the Montreal Congress, 8 May 1978
Original document — facsimile of the historical PDF (direct download).
This text has been restored from the Polish version of our archives, the French original of the 1978 lecture not being in our possession; it is to be checked against the primary source.