The audio-vocal lesson

“If I do this, my high range is immediately controlled by the ear. It’s a whole other world — immediately, the right side is working.”

In brief — This document is of precious rarity: in it we see Alfred Tomatis in person conduct an audio-vocal working session with a singer, then engage in dialogue with a baritone. Not a lecture, but the living workshop — the voice being made before our eyes. In it we recognise everything that the Audio-Vocal Workshop formalises today: the famous bone sound, the idea that the ear governs the voice, the art of singing with the body rather than with effort, posture, and even the most intimate register — the one in which the voice becomes “reception” rather than production.

Key points

• The ear governs the voice: “if I do this, my high range is immediately controlled by the ear”. The voice is not commanded by the will to push, but by listening.
• The bone sound: the whole work aims to make “the bone sing” — “it is the bone that sings the timbre” —, which Tomatis described in The Ear and the Voice.
• Singing with the body, not with effort: “what sings within you is the air; if you push the air outside, it’s over”. The high tongue, the resonating body, effort that lightens.
• Posture and verticality: standing upright in order to “receive”, mobilising balance and the vestibular system — “verticality… the man of the world”.
• The register of the gift: “you must always read the heart, always”; the voice as received energy (“you do not make the energy yourself, it is the universe that brings it to you”).

The ear governs the voice

This is the heart of all of Tomatis’s work, and here we see it at work. At one point he straightens up and exclaims: “if I do this, my high range is immediately controlled by the ear… it’s a whole other world — immediately, the right side is working.” The true voice is not a matter of force, but of listening: it is the ear that pilots the larynx, in real time. The whole point of the session is to disconnect the will to “push” so as to let the ear do the adjusting. “The brain does all the things,” he says; “afterwards, you no longer have the difficulty… you are liberated, you think only of singing, of interpreting.”

The bone sound

The word returns like a guiding thread: the bone that sings. “It is not by pushing that you will have the timbre — it is the bone that sings the timbre.” Tomatis brings out bone conduction, that vibration which travels through the skull and the skeleton rather than through the breath. He evokes the Russian basses, “always drawn to that sound”, and Caruso — the absolute reference, of whom he says that he could lighten his voice to the extreme because he “sang through the bone”. This is the knowledge he set down in The Ear and the Voice, and which the Audio-Vocal Workshop takes up today: learning to produce the bone sound in order to lighten the effort — a voice less tired, gentler, one that holds the listener longer.

Singing with the body, not with effort

The whole session is a fight against tension. “What sings within you is the air; if you push the air outside, it’s over.” He corrects ceaselessly the position of the tongue (“the tongue up, against the palate, not against the teeth”), the opening, the support — not in order to add force, but to remove it. “First, your body sings; you always sing with the body.” The idea is counter-intuitive for anyone who has learned to “support” at all costs: here, the right sound is the one that costs the least, because it rests on the resonance of the body and the bone, not on the expenditure of air.

Posture, verticality, balance

Tomatis constantly brings the singer back to their standing posture and their axis. He speaks of “pushing the vestibular system and balance”, links the voice to verticality — “the step of man coming into the world… verticality, that is the man of the world, totally different”. Standing upright is not an affectation: it is the condition for receiving the sound and letting it circulate through the whole body, “until it touches all the skin of the head”. The inner ear, organ of balance as much as of hearing, is here at the command post.

The register of the gift

The session at times tips into an almost mystical register, which tells of the man as much as of the teacher. Tomatis recalls a monk’s words: “after a good [chant], I feel that it is God who carries me with his children in velvet — it is so soft.” He speaks of energy that “comes down from the cosmos vertically”, of breathing “at the same rhythm as the sun”, and hammers home a directive that sums everything up: “you must always read the heart, always.” The voice, for him, is not first of all a production but a reception: “you do not make the energy yourself; it is the universe that brings it to you.”

Today: what science says

What is striking about this session is that it rests on a central intuition — it is the ear that adjusts the voice — today largely confirmed, surrounded by elements that are sometimes validated, sometimes more debatable.

“The ear governs the voice” — confirmed, and spectacularly so. The science of vocal control has proved Tomatis right on the essential: the voice is permanently subordinated to hearing. When one artificially shifts the pitch of a singer’s auditory feedback (pitch-shift), they correct it automatically, in about 100 milliseconds, without even realising it — this is the “pitch-shift reflex”, a reflexive audio-vocal loop. Current models describe exactly what Tomatis sensed: the brain continuously compares the voice produced with the expected voice and corrects the gap by means of the ear. Better still: imaging shows in trained singers a reinforced sensorimotor control of the voice. The idea that “the ear immediately controls the register” is not a metaphor — it is neurophysiology.

The “bone sound” — a real phenomenon. Tomatis invents nothing when he speaks of the bone that sings: we perceive our own voice in large part by bone conduction, the vibrations transmitted by the skull directly to the inner ear. This is precisely what explains why our recorded voice seems “wrong” to us: the microphone captures only the airborne path, higher-pitched, whereas the bone favours the low frequencies and gives our inner voice its roundness. Recent work even shows that this bone component helps us recognise our own voice. The reservation, to state honestly: that one can specifically train this “bone sound” to transform singing belongs to Tomatis’s clinical know-how, not to independent controlled proof.

Posture — confirmed, with a sizeable nuance. Recent reviews confirm that posture influences the voice: good posture improves respiratory support, the opening of the vocal tract and resonance, and reduces effort and vocal fatigue; bad posture, on the contrary, favours muscular tension and dysphonia. Tomatis is therefore right to put the standing body back at the centre. But on one point he takes the exact opposite of dominant pedagogy: his “myth of breathing”, which minimises the breath. Yet the same literature that validates posture insists on respiratory support (the appoggio) as the engine of the voice. His provocation has a virtue — shifting attention from the “air pump” towards the ear and resonance — but taken literally, it is not supported by the data.

Up to date. At a time when the voice is rehabilitated through biofeedback and singers record themselves constantly, Tomatis’s intuition has never seemed so current: working on the voice means first of all working on listening. What this session shows — a man teaching another to hear himself in order to unfold more fully — is exactly what the neurosciences of the audio-vocal loop confirm. The voice is a sound mirror; one still has to know how to listen to it.

Sources

• Audio-vocal loop & pitch control — Opposing and following vocal responses to pitch-shifted auditory feedback, Behroozmand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2012: pmc · The neural control of singing, Zarate, Front. Hum. Neurosci. 2013: frontiersin · reinforced sensorimotor control in singers, 2019: pmc
• Bone conduction & perception of one’s own voice — Bone conduction (overview): wikipedia · Bone conduction facilitates self-other voice discrimination, R. Soc. Open Sci. 2023: pmc
• Posture & voice — The Influence of Posture and Balance on Voice: A Review, 2018: researchgate · Associations between Posture, Voice, and Dysphonia: A Systematic Review, J. Voice: sciencedirect

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This audio-vocal work is no relic: it is transmitted today. Concetto Campo, head of the Tomatis centres in Rome and Verona, has made of it the Audio-Vocal / Audio-Instrumental Workshop (AAVAI), where one learns the bone sound and the listening posture “in order to use one’s vocal potential more fully, with a minimum of effort”.

Full transcription (English)

Session recorded in English; automatic transcription proofread. As this is practical work — posture corrections, sustained sounds, repetitions —, the transcription is by nature fragmentary; it is reproduced here as a reference document.

The Tomatis Method is a system of sound stimulation and consultation. The Tomatis Method and its patented electronic ear were created by Dr. Alfred Tomatis, noted French ear, nose, and throat specialist. The method improves the ability of the ear to attend to sound and integrate body movement, motivation and the ability to communicate, learn, and relate to self and others; it prepares the ear to learn a foreign language as a native speaker would hear it. This video covers just one aspect of the Tomatis Method, recorded during a five-day training session.

[…] No, like you’re playing a cello, with your bow. With the tongue, something — tongue like this, behind. It affects the volume here and here. More open. And when the tongue is open, always up. Your tongue is going down — right to the top. Not too much. Not naturally. The neck here, push this. […] The Sphinx — put yourself like the Sphinx. You give this face, but it’s not looking; your eyes are here. You see my finger? More — you feel, yeah? It’s very hard at the beginning. Stretch your muscle of the belly. With the thumb, you open your mouth, very straight, more with the tongue up. If you do like you are doing now, it is impossible to increase the sound, because it means air — without air. And the heart. The heart. Here, not the top. First, your body is singing, so you have the open mouth — you are singing always with the body.

In fact, you have two little muscles behind — very weak muscles. Here, there are three muscles: the superior contractor, the medium and the lower. Your nose is singing a little bit too much. […] I have a knocking in terms of bone conduction and maintaining it, which has always been an issue — if you listen to the Russian basses, you know, which have always been attracted to that sound. After, all the way you are singing, it’s neat to feel this high range, like a soprano — but to open it all the way, like a contralto.

If I do this, my high range is very controlled immediately by the ear. My God. Immediately. It’s a whole other world. Immediately the right side is functioning. […] The more you go up high, the more you try to push it. […] A lone woman came into my home saying: I come in 1953, my right ear is not functioning well for control. Now, absorb this sound much more — like if you wish to drink.

Tongue on the palate, not the top; the top is behind the teeth. You are up at a fair, three meters high, and you sit down, with people who understand nothing of what you’re doing. To create here the vowel. You open your heart. Now you absorb the sound — your brain. You are not having to work. The Italians know this: they push something flat. Remember, you are not in the brain; you have a great muscle, but we are not conscious of it — you need to become conscious of it. More with the body. The tongue is not sufficiently against the palate.

I think of the step of the man coming into the world: the verticality. This is a standing baby, and the eating man — a man of the world, totally different. […] This is a wonderful sound. Before to have the volume, you finish — you open the mouth. You start always the tongue here, the body enters quickly to do the volume, and after, just a little bit here, to excite this volume — a stationary wave, not a pushing wave. Unfortunately the tongue is attached here, by the jaw, which is bone. I have no opportunity to adapt my larynx essentially: your control is with the ear, and the brain is doing all the things. After, you are liberated — you are thinking essentially to sing, to interpret, no more.

A monk a day said to me: I feel, after a good [chant], that it’s God bringing me with his children in velvet — it’s so soft. If you’re like this, you don’t receive. The Kundalini is going down from the cosmos vertically — the energy of the cosmos. If you don’t receive by the cosmos, you are not. To be here, you receive; you don’t make energy yourself, you do it by the universe, and it’s bringing you, and you have all the chakras. […] If you block here, you block some organ. The Indians say: if you do sound, you need to integrate this energy, because your brain is functioning better. The Japanese say the sound is coming by the heart — it is functioning. Mercure, breathing at the same time as the sun: when you see the sun, it’s breathing at the same rhythm, and we are breathing, if we are well, at the same rhythm. Then you are totally involved; the vagus is liberated.

Under the diaphragm. You have the impression that you touch all the skin — a great correspondence. […] Push your belly out. Now, with the sound, you need to see your body, all the way interiorly. The soundless mirror: immediately, you are in front of yourself — difficult to accept. My name is John. […] And now you push here, and the brain — the middle brain — and you modify the push, your vestibular system and your balance.

The great singers are always like this. You know, the birds are not singing with their larynx — they have a syrinx; they have three lobes on one side and two on the other, so one side vibrates faster than the other, like a whistle. […] I had a singer come to Paris to see me. Every day, all the exercise of Caruso — singing on the stage, normal, except this: it makes my voice easier. When the jaw drops, it’s my head singing. Caruso — because he pulled… I was taught to keep the tip of the tongue here, but yours goes back. Yes — the touch is always on the hard palate, not the teeth. Caruso. You look like Caruso. Thank you.

More. Now it’s good — more your heart is crying. If I sing like a Hungarian, a person needs to read always the heart, always. You are looking forward to have timbre — no, the bone is singing the timbre. If I do, hmmm — nice, it’s good. I say to the piano: mong, mong, mong, mong.