The Sonic Inferno

I have chosen a theme on which I have been gathering knowledge for a long time, on which I have been working for a long time, for almost 50 years now: noise. I became inclined to concern myself with noise when I was working at the Aeronautical Arsenals; I ran the laboratory, and there we had a major problem, which was to protect people against noise, against assault. And since then, things have changed so much, noise has increased so much, that it has now truly become what I have called the sonic inferno.

I am going to show you a few transparencies. It is not my habit, but since we have translations, with many foreigners who have come, who come from every corner of the world for the congress, and since there are interpreters, when I project a transparency I speak more slowly, at least to help the translation. Usually I talk a bit like a machine gun; people always ask me to speak, I speak softly and I can’t manage it, and it’s a choice. If I go slowly, I have no more ideas. If I speak fast, I can’t be translated. I find one has to choose. The sonic inferno — well, it turns out that nowadays noise has surely become one of the greatest scourges that exist.

We don’t suspect it, because we are steeped in it and we don’t realise. You will see, as we go along, that you will be forced to think about it, and perhaps a little more closely than usual. The importance of noise is such that, in a survey carried out a few years ago, well, it was found in France — and it’s much the same everywhere — that 50% of the French considered noise the number-one scourge. And already, when you let people reflect a little, they begin to realise it. And at the time, seven or eight years ago, France was spending — France alone was spending — 25 billion new francs on noise. When you look at what that represents, 25 billion,

that already comes to a certain sum, but it is not excessive in view of the disorders it sets off. And why? Well, it turns out that 15% of absenteeism is linked to noise. So 15% of people who cannot go to work, because they are caught, abandoned, falling into a whole pathology we’ll see in a moment, which is great fatigue, unexplained fatigue. There are also accidents. 10% of accidents are linked to a lack — in factories particularly — to a lack of vigilance. When a subject has been heavily fatigued, when he is assaulted by noise, he loses his energy, he can no longer progress, and there his tone fades away and his vigilance is disturbed.

Finally, we have colleagues here — I hope they won’t rejoice at the fact — there are 20% of subjects committed to psychiatry because of noise. And it gives the psychiatrists work, and it doesn’t solve the question. At a certain point, there is something dramatic. So it is truly an inferno we are passing through, and you will see that we are nonetheless obliged to try, to attempt to take care, and these results give nonetheless a very distressing prospect. And what is being done about it? You will, unfortunately, not see much. And noise has truly become a source of intoxication. You have all — I hope you don’t do as they do — come across families where the television blares all day long,

even two sets or three in the same room, no one listening, everyone calmly devouring the four lentils on the plate, but they need a drone, a kind of element to be rocked by, an element they don’t even watch, but they need that noise. Why “softly”? Because they need a certain atmosphere. It’s dramatic. It already proves that people no longer know how to listen. It proves that they need a kind of stimulation. We’ll see — the ear is a device that stimulates the brain with electrical potential. It is a necessity. We need noise more than food, but not that noise. People have reached the point of no longer listening. They just about manage to hear, to let themselves be passed through by that toxin

which enters, as we’ll see, by several routes apart from the ear. It has become a drug, a very toxic drug. We haven’t yet put a name to it. It’s noise as a drug, but it is as toxic as many of the substances we go on to take. And then the consequences are going to be very, very serious. There is an escalation in noise. Nowadays it is more and more deafening, and one may ask why. Well, let’s not deceive ourselves. The first element of this escalation is a purely commercial matter. The more very powerful amplifiers one sells, the more very loud amps one sells, well, the happier one is and the more money it brings in, that’s certain. And when you take a hi-fi system, it isn’t very expensive,

even the big ones, even the good ones. The loudspeaker, by contrast, reaches absolutely astronomical prices precisely so as to carry the number of channels one wanted to put through. The second element, well, is simply linked to the fact that today’s technology allows people to make more and more noise — singers especially, the stars, who engage in a kind of escalation of noise, and the one who makes the most noise is the one who believes he is having the most success. Indeed, they keep increasing the intensity. And here, I made a little diagram that has been reproduced here. I thank the one who made it, who is Monsieur Altard. And for this diagram, I gave him curves and he drew them for me. Can it be seen? Is it more or less visible?

You’ve heard about the escalation of sound. Well, in ‘60 — before ‘60, in ‘57 exactly — the Beatles were already making noise. It was already a little staggering. Well, they had a 30-watt amplifier. Some time later, two years later, an academic orchestra used 300 watts. That was the overflow, and the worry was already beginning to appear. And when we got to Pink Floyd, they had at last reached the summit of 1000 watts. Well, all that is nothing, since nowadays, thanks to Bob Dylan, we have reached 120,000 watts. That is already something colossal, unthinkable, but unfortunately achievable. And we have better than that, since here it’s a number of decades of watts.

You now have, in certain nightclubs, noises that far exceed that intensity. And there is talk now of orchestras that are going to do 60 times 40,000 watts. That is to say, if that intensity were here in the room, we would all come out as deaf as posts on leaving, at the end of 45 minutes. So it’s important. But at present there is no reaction. Recently I was reading, three or four weeks ago, someone wanted to react against a nightclub that was ruining his ears. And the owner replied, and he wasn’t condemned — on the contrary, perhaps he was congratulated, I don’t know, but it went that far — that for the joy of hearing today’s noises,

today’s music and today’s intensity, it was well worth losing your ear. Yes, but that’s how it is, and no one says anything. But I think you won’t say anything either if you don’t fight. People will go on. You have to do as I do, take up your pilgrim’s staff and go out to fight and say it. The consequences are dramatic. And it is all the more dramatic in that, in France — especially in Paris, but elsewhere too — a third of the young men who present themselves at the conscription board, that is, before becoming soldiers, are examined, and a third are deaf, 33%. They are deaf with a deafness, which we’ll see in a moment, that is a traumatic deafness. They are wretched.

Later, they will no longer have the chance to be dynamic. They have forever blighted, for their whole lives, the vertical posture. They have annihilated their potential for creativity. In short, it’s house plants we are manufacturing, and everyone knows this very well, but we already have them on our hands. There is nothing left for these people. They are too young, only to drag themselves along a bit like plantigrades, with no activity, and rather despairing. To go deaf after working in a boilermaking shop — there’s less to explain. But to go deaf for having heard three times some music… for I have seen people go deaf after one evening at a nightclub. It has come up in consultation.

It depends. There’s a very important personal factor, like the man who doesn’t drink like a fish but does drink a fair amount every day and stays well, while another, who has one aperitif a week, unfortunately ends up an alcoholic. It’s a very important, individual sensitivity. Well, the behaviour of the ear — it is made to listen, of course, but it nonetheless has its limits. And one may ask what is the psychological behaviour of the ear faced with the acoustic world. Here it is always represented in a way that is at least amusing. This is what I was given. I can show you. The ear can hear sounds that are pleasant to it. And you see that here, the values have been marked in decibels.

Let me remind you that the decibel is a logarithmic value. When you have a sound of 0 decibels compared with another at 10 decibels, that’s 10 times more. 20 decibels is 100 times more. 30 decibels, 1000 times more. It is an acoustic pressure that increases logarithmically. Well, the ear finds sounds very pleasant up to 50 — about 50 decibels. It tolerates them between 50 and 90. We begin to reach the limits up to 110. And then beyond that, we reach what is called the threshold of pain. The very one we put up with for having heard today’s music. And here the diagram is completed by this imagery, something funny. The sound of the forest. The sound of the forest is pleasant.

And soft music. Someone who is speaking. When we speak, at the lips there are 100 decibels. That’s enormous. But the sound diminishes as a function of distance, of the square of the distance. It’s in inverse proportion, then, to the square of the distance. And roughly, normally, when you talk with someone, they perceive between 60 and 80 decibels. That is still bearable. After that you have the noise of the street, of the city. The city moves about; even in Paris, we can reckon there are 80 decibels of background noise. That’s not too bad. 80 decibels is practically the noise of a train coming into a station. Not too bad. After that you have machines that start to be very noisy, motorcycles in particular.

Then you have certain machines for ploughing. Then there’s the factory floor. In factories you reach 110 decibels. At the Arsenals we had on average 110, 120 decibels. 120 decibels makes, logarithmically, 10 to the power of 4. That makes 10,000 times more than a train coming into a station. So that’s already quite a lot. And now, with the jet engines, we go up to 130, 135 decibels. And you have nightclubs that exceed all that. No need for jet engines, it’s even better. When I left the Arsenals, a long time ago now, I used to measure the engine — the engine that powered the Caravelle. The Caravelle gave 132 decibels. I remember it all the more because at the time I was measuring the voices of singers.

I had a singer named Luccioni, who was the great, great French dramatic tenor, who sang at the such-and-such. Well, he gave 140 decibels at one metre. That is to say, he outdid all my jet engines. And I think I was the only one able to listen to him in the room. And when he sang, he set the crystals of my floor lamp ringing. I had another who was even more powerful; he made the windowpanes vibrate. And I believe I was the only one able to listen to him close up as well.

Now, when there is noise, what do you think of? You surely think of the ear. It’s the ear we think of. As soon as we speak of sound, of sound in all its forms, we think of the ear. And that’s absolutely natural, it seems normal to us, because to us it seems to have been designed to perceive sound, to appreciate it, to savour it, in short. But remember, that is a very reductive conception. Reductive in the sense that sound passes through quite elsewhere, and we shall see it, moreover, in the experiment I did at the Arsenals; it doesn’t fit with the clinic. Let me give you an example. At the Arsenals we had people who were very sensitive to noise.

I had the chance to study them from every angle. In particular, I would put people into a sound environment — of one isolated part of the body, the whole lower body. I isolated the lower body by placing the subjects, half their body then, inside a huge concrete tube, the kind used for the great water mains, for piping materials. And at the other end I had put a loudspeaker, and the whole thing was — as one does in a laboratory — with balls of string and bits of paper, well sealed, and I would let music through, at a given moment, into the loudspeaker. In other words, the subject had his head outside and heard nothing. Except, when I put headphones on his head,

I had the chance to modify his listening as I wished. When I suppressed his listening, when I cut off his chance to listen, I could put through anything at all. At the level of his feet, nothing got through. In other words, I had to kindle the desire to listen in him; it didn’t suit me at all to have sounds tickling his toes. By contrast, if I gave him an ear set to listen — which is easy to do with electronic filters — he heard all the music through his skin. And there I had the proof that the skin and the nervous system were not the same thing — that we know — but that the skin was at the same time a differentiated part of the ear. If you give the ear permission to listen,

you don’t listen with the ear alone, you listen with the whole skin. That is a very important phenomenon to remember. In other words, so that people who go up to a jet engine put headphones on their heads — it’s better than nothing. But not to suffer from noise on entering a jet engine, you have to put on a diving suit, and then you risk nothing. Otherwise it can’t work, but it’s also uncomfortable in a diving suit. So there’s a whole difficult approach. It’s true that very quickly today’s noises exceed the natural protection of the ear. What does that mean? Well, the ear is a device able to perceive a whole set of accommodations. There are two extremely powerful muscles,

the hammer muscle and the stirrup muscle. The hammer muscle is made to tense the eardrum. It’s thanks to this muscle that from time to time, if it pleases you when you’re at an orchestra, you hear the first flute or the second violin, or if there’s a singer on stage, you may risk hearing me, but you choose — a kind of selection takes place. It’s thanks to the hammer muscle, which tenses the tympanic membrane more or less. The stirrup muscle, which is inside, is the one that will open or not the inner ear, that will give us the chance to be able to perceive or not. These are small muscles, but of extraordinary power for their volume, and they need to be trained.

In particular — I mention this in passing — very often we pay no attention to a child. The child arrives with a musculature of his own which, like any other musculature, is not yet well equipped and ready to defend itself. Well, if we’re not careful, if we give a child too much noise, if at a given moment we provide too great a wealth of intensity, then the child has no possibility of defending himself and destroys his ear. So you have to be careful at that level. Many children suffer terribly from this problem. Well, the ear, as it ages, fortunately becomes trained; it becomes more and more efficient. And when one enters, as the old workers used to do,

into workshops where there was a little noise, they trained their ear. Very often these workers had been taken on to be put afterwards on piston engines, and there they advanced up the progression of intensity, of energy. Well, by becoming accustomed, from 30 horsepower up to 3000, they could then move on to the jet engines. By contrast, people who were taken straight on and put on the jet engines — within the week, off went their ear, because they weren’t in the habit of becoming muscular in their electrical muscles. If you like, one has to become an athlete of electrical muscles; that’s the summit of what one can do with listening. And it can be trained, one manages it very well.

If you take a musician, for example — there’s a young musician, this young musician who may end up as a professional, but if you plunge him into an orchestra straight away, as was done at one point with young conductors who had the chance to conduct from the age of 7 or 8, well, you saw them disappear at 15; they were no longer on stage, because they were deaf. In an orchestra at 120 decibels, to have the chance to enter 120 decibels in the orchestra, you sometimes have to scratch away at your violin a little, half an hour a week, then if you’re good, 2 or 3 times a week, and if you’re good, more and more efficient, you’ll play it 2 or 3 hours a day,

and at last, if you’re very good, you’ll go into a quartet, and so on. You increase your defence against noise through a musculature that becomes more and more powerful. And straight off, one cannot tolerate noises three times over. At present we have a big problem, with the young especially, who have seen drum kits on television 2 or 3 times; it’s the great fashion. Formerly, to be a drummer you already had to be a very seasoned musician, they were full conductors who went into the orchestra to be, at a given moment, in the percussion. And now parents, perhaps to have peace, perhaps so as not to go wrong, readily buy a child of 7, 8, 10 years old a drum kit, which they put in a little room,

he bangs away like a deaf man, but he becomes deaf. At 15, often, we can no longer do anything. It happens regularly. So the ear is overwhelmed in its natural potential. And what happens? Well, it’s the whole organism that is disturbed. We’ll see in a moment why. I think it’s important that we already have this notion. Remember once more, then, that the skin — one could demonstrate it, I was able to demonstrate it almost 30 years ago — the skin and the ear are the same organ. The skin is a differentiated piece of ear. The comparison I can give you, the better to understand: you have an eye, this eye is going to look, it looks with the whole of its retina, in fact, practically.

But if it wants to take aim, it will use the underlying central part, called the macula, or the yellow spot, a little below the central part, and there it will take aim at things. Well, the skin perceives. It takes in the noise. But when it wants to take aim at sounds, it will use its macula, which is called the cochlea. The cochlea is the part that performs the analysis of sounds in the ear. There are two devices in the ear: one called the vestibule, which governs all the muscles of the body and ensures verticality; and the analysis of sounds, which allows us, at a given moment, to follow language through all its analyses, and with a speed that no electronic device

can even begin to exceed. At present, the drama of the hypertrophy of intensity ends in sonic aberrations that invade our vital space. And this vital space, we can already live it, in a certain way. There are corners of the world where the air does not vibrate much. And you have all travelled — it’s the custom now — and no doubt many of you have been to Madrid airport, for example. Well, for us Parisians, we are a little annihilated when we arrive in Madrid, there is so much noise. For a Spaniard, it’s quite all right, he doesn’t notice it. And if you had the chance to hear recordings from Tibet, you’d find it’s an incessant noise,

chanting on every side. Well, in Tibet, it’s true that when you go up in altitude, the air thins, and the high frequencies risk, at a given moment, not having the benefit of what sound gives — that is, the high-pitched parts, which give energy to the cortex — and there the subject is obliged to make sounds all day long, the famous Oms, whatever you like. There is therefore a need, a necessity, to activate the brain; otherwise you become adynamic, losing all vital impulse, precisely. Well, once more, when the ear is jolted in all its defence processes, there is a level of assault, for it becomes — if it is no longer operational,

if it no longer plays its part — then it’s the whole skin that lets everything through, and we see people who easily deteriorate in their general state. The ear deteriorates in a curious way. It will arrive at a deafness we’ll find in a moment, a particular deafness called traumatic deafness — sound-trauma deafness, exactly. It is typed; the moment you see it, you make the diagnosis; it’s a deafness that strikes certain points, but which does not disorganise the whole ear. Only one part of the ear is going to be damaged, and we’ll soon find it again. Are the interpreters managing to keep up, or am I speaking too fast? More or less? I’ll try to go even more slowly.

What is striking, when one works among people, in noise, or even among the young today, is that little by little one sees them accumulate a certain fatigue, and what is very important is that there is a kind of deterioration of the general state. And at the same time we’ll see the famous psychic disorders appear. And I had the chance, at the Arsenal, to have an enormous population working in noise, since there were 10,000 workers — the 10,000 weren’t on jet engines, but many suffered from noise — and I had the chance to work with them, even on the test benches, in order to live with them, to be able to recover. Their psyche degraded;

they became irritable, unbearable, demanding, but I hadn’t understood it at the start. The brain is a fantastic integrator, and little by little I was adding up my observations, but it was difficult to realise it day by day, and it went along rather slowly all the same. I was telling you that the ear was going to arrive at a traumatic deafness. This traumatic deafness comes about for two reasons. It is a function of the quality of the noise. If the noise exceeds 130 decibels, it’s certain that it’s dramatic. It is also a function of individual sensitivity. As I told you a moment ago, one subject can be more sensitive than another. Let me give you an example. We had, at the Arsenals,

at the time — it was an exception — a young woman from the Polytechnique; in France, the École Polytechnique is the summit of French schools, along with the École Normale Supérieure. She had asked to specialise in the wind tunnels. A wind tunnel makes at least 130–120 decibels. This young woman, delighted to reach the fulfilment of her dreams in obtaining this post, found herself stuck, because the moment she went up onto the jet engines, after a few days, she began to lose weight. She easily lost 5 or 6 kilos in the week, at most in 15 days. I withdrew her, I put her out of harm’s way. In a month she had recovered everything. And then she’d start again. But she relapsed in her alterations

of weight, at a given moment. So much so that, unfortunately, we were obliged to tell her to do something else. She had a post at the Arsenals, and she found another, but it wasn’t the one she liked — that’s another detail. She nonetheless had to be protected, for we would have gone much further; the degradation would have been such that she would have gone deaf, and perhaps the noise — the quality of the noise — is important, and so is the quantity. That’s another notion, which you are living right now. You can put music through a personal stereo at 90 dB; it doesn’t seem very loud. So you may well not suffer, but if you listen to it eight hours a day,

the musculature can no longer make any defence. You see, quantity is important too. A comparison, because these are very important muscles. You have a hand. In this hand you put a 100-kg weight. You’ll get a mash, then, instead of a hand, dropped flat on the ground. Now, if you put 1 kg, you’ll bear it. If you’re asked to hold 1 kg for 3 hours, you’ll see that there’s a weariness, but the musculature does the same thing. So at a given moment a process will increase. The alteration of this ear — if you’re in the chamber, be careful — and having instituted a whole cycle of examinations, the ear goes quickly to an irreversibility,

a deterioration of perception with all that that will entail in a moment. We’ll see it. The ear is found destroyed, dislocated, but not entirely destroyed. Here is the look it will take on. I’ve drawn it — it’s very schematic. Here is the look it has when it is theoretically normal. That’s the second point. It’s the classic American-type audiometry, where everything has been aligned on the phenomenon of physics and not of physiology. We have a curve like this one. In blue, it’s the curve obtained when you measure the ear with a classic audiometer, with the earphone. In red, it’s with a vibrator. In red, it gives us the pretension of measuring the nerve. That’s false.

There’s the skin, which is there; there’s the bone, which is there; there’s the excitation of the whole cranial box of the inner ear, and then the excitation of the cells. Then the nerve is at the very end. Anyway, we got into the habit of saying: in red, it’s perception by bone conduction, and the other by air conduction. An ear like this one, exposed to noise — still depending on the individual — after some time will have a degradation of this type. It begins like this. This degradation shows what is called a hole, or a scotoma. It’s a hole that is always at 4000. Very rarely at 2000. Rarely elsewhere. And at the Arsenals we had tried to shift these 4000, by putting through in particular

very, very low sounds. We thought we’d get a lesion in the low frequencies. It’s exceptional for you to have an alteration in the lows, and it’s always at 4000. At the start, we accepted it. You don’t know. Now I know why. Anyway, at the time, that’s how it was. If by chance you leave the subject in the noise, and if by chance you don’t treat him once he has started such a deafness, well, it’s progressive. Little by little the ear degrades, and it will take on this look. There are no more high frequencies, nothing left. The subject begins to be bothered. Bothered when there’s noise. Bothered when several people are talking. He begins to cock his ear. And it becomes… He no longer dares go to the restaurant.

He is very anxious as soon as he meets people, because at a given moment he still hears them, but he no longer understands anything. It’s an absolute drama. Is it irremediable, irreversible, as I said a moment ago? Well, first there is a way to prevent it from happening. We had worked at the Arsenals. We had the chance to examine people every 3 to 6 months. And let me remind you that there were at least 2000 of them working on the jet engines, so we had to be equipped to see them systematically. And we worked, my wife and I, for several years; bear in mind, for those who do listening tests here, that we did 30 of them.

Per day. I don’t know if you see what that represents as work. From time to time we’d have preferred to be a bit outside. But it allowed us to detect a phase. An alarm phase. An alarm phase where suddenly the ear presents itself as follows. You know, a moment ago everything was linear. The ear is still linear. But we see the red — the nerve, in fact — beginning to come through. It’s a nerve in distress. It is no longer protected by this part. Now we know that this part is governed by the stirrup muscle and the other by the hammer muscle. When you have this, if you intervene quickly, if you protect the subject, if you remove him

straight away from the test bench, his ear recovers very fast. In 8, 10, 15 days at the most. And if there are alterations elsewhere, he recovers them. And what we did at the time, before plunging the subject back into the noise, we trained him, we put him under the Electronic Ear. Because they know what it is. We had no re-education that plays the way the middle ear was meant to play. We teach the stirrup muscle to do a certain gymnastics in order to recover. And then we put him back into the noise without damage. When I told you a moment ago that the completely destroyed ear was irreversible up to a point, it’s true that you don’t create an ear that is dead, you don’t manufacture it.

Although now we are starting to revise this a little. We know that cells manage to regenerate. Anyway, it’s the dawning of a whole new era. But when you have a very damaged ear, as one can see — I showed you — there are people who can no longer go anywhere, at a given moment, without suffering from the noise. It’s paradoxical. You have people who are deaf, and at the least bit of noise — the least crumpling of paper in particular — you see them at a given moment climbing the walls, so much does it hurt them. But this we manage to re-educate. And we teach them, with their poor ear, to have the desire to listen. And from experience, it is better to have

a poor ear that wants to listen than a very good one that refuses to hear. It happens quite often. I was contacted very early — I was directing, then, the physiological and acoustical laboratory. I was contacted very early by Professor Monnier, between ‘47 and ‘51. That’s a fair while ago. Knowing that I dealt more with noise, and on humans. Professor Monnier, accompanied by his pupil Professor Lehmann, had come to see me to set me a problem, which was that of the audiogenic crisis of the white mouse. At first it didn’t mean much to me. I don’t know if it already rings a bell for you. But the audiogenic crisis, what is it? Well, there is a species of mouse. A very specific species of mouse

which has the misfortune of not being able to pass through noise at all. When you put it in noise, it is suddenly seized by a paralysis of the lower limbs. As soon as you reach 110 decibels, after 5 to 10 minutes, it is very agitated. Its hind legs begin to be paralysed. And if you leave it, it begins to tremble more and more. If you leave it, after half an hour, an hour, it is dead. But… So Monnier came to ask my opinion. And I did as he did, I didn’t know what it was about. And for years he searched for it, and so did I. And now, with hindsight, I know what that animal was doing. I was too focused on the ear to discover it. I had not yet discovered that the ear and the skin

are the same thing, that it passed through everywhere. Now I know why. In fact, for those who work with us — and the psychiatrists have encountered it — when they have an anorexia, it’s at the same time a spasmophiliac, a tetanic. When you put through too much high-pitched sound to someone who is tetanic, schizoid, he begins at a given moment to have tetanies, that is, muscles that lock up. You can have muscles that lock up, even become a bit cramped. If you take a tetany, a great spasmophilia, you see the person at a given moment fix his fingers and arms until he is hampered for breathing. If the cry continues, you can go as far as death. Be careful. Well, that’s what the white mouse was doing.

At the time, Monnier had nonetheless led me to something else. Lehmann above all — he was the one doing the work. Lehmann was at the laboratory of Jouy-en-Josas, and Professor Monnier was at the Sorbonne. And he had made me live the experiment too, but done on rats. The rat does not die. But it isn’t happy either. As soon as you go above a certain level, it becomes nervous, it becomes aggressive, insomniac and sterile. So there is already a modification of the whole. As for me, in parallel, I was trying to see what I could find at the Arsenals. Well, I had discovered that my young men, who were on the jet engines, presented the same picture, made up of nervousness, irritability.

No one could do anything at all in the house anymore without the pots and pans starting to clatter, the subject was so nervous. There was aggression. He was at the same time insomniac. I wasn’t able to check whether he had become sterile; they didn’t tell me. A parenthesis I never elucidated. On top of that, there was a tachycardia, a high blood pressure and, of course, auditory emissions. I didn’t know why that was, either. Anyway, it was nonetheless interesting to observe it. A young woman researcher, a physician,

Josette Della Quala — I don’t know if you remember — had found, and I agreed with her, that there was an increase in catecholamines. That is, in adrenal production, and of corticoids too. So a stimulation of the pituitary-adrenal axis and, above all, something that interested me when I was working on much the same thing, but on singers: a bone excitation. Indeed, when you make sounds and these sounds are well made, they are made by bone conduction, and that’s the only way to reach the pituitary and the pineal gland. You’ve seen that people try, at a given moment, to excite these glands — in yoga in particular, you stand on your head,

you do the headstand, anything you like, but you can have a well-irrigated pituitary, but if it isn’t switched on, if it isn’t excited, you can’t do it. And that explains to you that the great singers who sing well, who have a cranial box vibrating at very high intensity, have a colossal energy, an enormous vitality, because the whole stimulation process reappears. At the Arsenals, then, we had realised that to the somatic reactions — you mentioned it a moment ago — there always corresponded an auditory lesion, which allowed me afterwards to play. To play — and there is nonetheless something important here, which is that we had no elements

to know what a real intoxication could be, except a noise intoxication, for which there is no clinical evidence — only a weariness. And this weariness was for a very long time unexplained. I think for many it is still unexplained. We are beginning to understand it. The subject is well, you do all the tests on Earth, you find nothing, it’s just as mysterious — there’s a fatigue, and then a weight loss that is just as mysterious, as I put it there, as the fatigue itself, and the only thing noted, at a given moment, is a kind of acceleration of the sedimentation rate, which goes deep into the pathologies; when you have a toxic pathology, you have an increase, in many diseases,

of the sedimentation, and an eosinophilia. This eosinophilia — that is, the eosinophils show there’s a parasite somewhere, that there’s something, an invading infection, parasitic in particular — and this eosinophilia, I had found it in the following way, already at the Arsenals. You take a subject, you send a beam of sound right at his face, and on the contrary you see the eosinophils drop. Usually they’re at zero. Anyway, if there are a few, you see them diminish. You find eosinophils in asthma — you have a great signature of asthma, so there’s an allergy, an intolerance. You pass the same beam at the level of the abdomen, and suddenly the eosinophils rise.

Well, those were the only things one could find. How to explain that a fellow with a little eosinophilia begins to lose weight in a terrible way? The only chance was to put him at rest and try to see what was happening. Once again, the only test that played any part was that the subject put at rest recovered.

What was found to be modified? A great many things were found to be modified, but just like that, it’s difficult. When you see a subject every three months, when you nonetheless see him regularly at the Arsenals as I did, when you see someone close to you who progressively goes deaf, you don’t notice the modifications. Well, at the Arsenals, I had equipped a whole laboratory that allowed me to do, in the media, quite different research. I plunged the subject into another auditory atmosphere. Thanks to wires, I made him hear as if he were deaf. I made him hear as if he were traumatically deaf. And immediately,

I saw a great many things. I narrowed his auditory field, which became impaired. Noise became, for him, without harmonics. He was adynamic since he no longer had, at a given moment, any cortical charge. He was no longer assured. And at the same time his voice became dull. But for him, sounds were dull too. They were white, without relief, drab, wearying, stifling, non-recharging. So there was, before us, something happening. It’s important. And above all, we witnessed straight away something that happens afterwards. It’s that the subject hears without understanding — it’s truly the signature of so-called transmission deafness, so-called perception deafness, and sound-trauma deafness.

Well, that’s the model of occupational deafness. And I always say it would be better to hear nothing than to play that game. Indeed, these are wretched people who always have their ear on the alert. They just hear something that they cannot decode. And they understand everything askew. They are unbearable. And you’ll see that, on top of it, we don’t tolerate the deaf. As considerate as we are toward a blind person — as much as we surround him, as much as we stay close to him — a deaf person, you put him at the end of the table, and when you’ve had to tell him the same thing 12 times and all the wit has vanished, well, you neglect the deaf one, and he is a burden. The psychic destruction will follow, of course,

the auditory pattern, and the progression is all the greater as the auditory field narrows more and more. Behavioural problems may be encountered, and when you’re in a laboratory — and you can go very far — you can go from simple annoyance, there are sounds that annoy us, that tease us, all the way to an epileptic fit. So you have to be careful. You mustn’t allow yourself to send too many sounds. In particular, if you send unbalanced sounds, more to one ear than the other, you have, at a given moment, a triggering of differing energy, and in each ear you have a difference of potential, and the epileptic clash can occur. So you have to be careful.

But many epileptic elements can be reduced to nothing if you manage to rebalance the ears, for in epileptics there is always, at a given moment, a difference of potential. Today’s music is dramatic. I was already telling you so a moment ago, and if you read it without too much passion and without being too committed — I’m not against people who experiment, but if you follow closely, on the medical level, the great events like those in Germany or on the Isle of Wight in the south of England, you’ll see that there is always an incalculable number of hospitalisations after the show, and a few who die. And that, we don’t sing about, we don’t say.

There are always a few immediate hospitalisations during the great show, and they are deep cardiac disorders. Now we know why. Noise can grip you in the gut. It can show itself as an assault, as I told you, but a vomiting, palpitations, you have a respiratory blockage — in short, a thousand things that can happen. Well, remember that all this is linked to a nerve called the vagus. The vagus. Or the tenth cranial pair. The vagus is a fantastic nerve. It’s the only nerve in the body that has every function. It’s the only nerve in the body that has every function. It is at once motor, sensory and autonomic. In other words, it does everything.

It is so vast in its distribution that it makes up, on its own, practically the parasympathetic. We call it parasympathetic, a nerve that ought to be parallel to the sympathetic. But it happens that we have so polluted it, so traumatised it, so filled it with useless elements that, instead of being the parallel of the sympathetic, instead of being a probe that lets us know how we breathe, how our body can beat, how the intestine can work, it has become the antagonist of the sympathetic. Instead of being its counterweight, it’s the one that prevents the sympathetic from working. That’s why, when you’re not well, it’s because there’s a barrier, that we’re not sympathetic.

In today’s life, we no longer understand anything and the sympathetic is bridled. The sympathetic is an autonomous system that doesn’t work with the usual system but is plugged directly into the cosmos. It’s the one that regulates the cardiac tick-tock, that regulates the breathing rhythm, that regulates nutrition, and that will regulate even reproduction. In the modern world, we’ve forgotten these details. All we know is to try to treat it when it’s not going well — that’s no longer sympathetic. Well, to understand properly what is happening: the vagus nerve, when it emerges from the skull, first sends a small bundle for the dura mater inside the skull, and then it has a bundle that goes off to the outside

to innervate the outer wall of the eardrum, the tympanic membrane, and the lower part of the external auditory canal. In other words, noise — noise is going to tickle it. Now, this nerve will descend; it will anastomose, weld itself, with the ninth pair to innervate the whole pharynx; it will then innervate the larynx, motor and sensory; it will then innervate the bronchi, the oesophagus; it will innervate the stomach; it will innervate, at a given moment, on its way, the intestine, the spleen, the two kidneys, the whole small intestine and the colon, and as far as the anastomosis, as far as the genitals. It’s a fantastic nerve that wanders everywhere. But if the sound is too powerful, all the rest goes into resonance. We have the good fortune here to have

a lady who comes directly from Japan. She knows a sound called the kiai. Well, a kiai — and they do this in judo — it’s said to be a sound that will kill. I’ve never seen it; I’ve analysed a great many kiais, there are about 140 of them, I’ve analysed more than forty. Well, the kiai kills no one. But when you make a good kiai, well, suddenly you are completely cut down, you can no longer breathe for a few tenths of a second, and the heart likewise goes wild, which gives the other person the chance, at a given moment, to attack you a bit harder. And this same kiai, if someone has fainted, you make a kiai and he wakes up — always because you have touched,

at once, the heart, the lung and all the rest. So there, at a given moment, something that goes very, very strongly, and I think — we were speaking of it this afternoon — the kiai comes out of the belly, the hara. To make a fine kiai, the sound must come out of the whole being, at a given moment. Anyway, there’s the beloved explanation of all the tetanies, of all the disorders, of the cardiac disorders, and why many people, in noise, at a given moment, end up hospitalised because they can no longer regulate. When you speak, for example — when pieces are arrhythmic, it’s fine from time to time, a syncopation is fine, but when you make music that’s too syncopated, that’s not in the cardiac rhythm,

you disturb your cardiac rhythm, you are hampered. For those who work with us, they know how we restore an ear. On the contrary, we’ll coax it toward physiological rhythms, and there are kinds of music built essentially on physiological rhythms, Mozart in particular. People always ask me why Mozart, but the essential thing about Mozart is that he wrote to the rhythm of his heart, to the rhythm of his breathing. It’s not quite an adult rhythm — that’s why he gives us so much vitality — it’s a child’s rhythm. Mozart was conditioned himself for having had the chance to compose from the age of three; it gave him the chance, at a given moment,

to have an accelerated rhythm, but he was always young, and whether you take Mozart at the beginning or at the end, it’s always young Mozart. By contrast, with a heart beating so fast, he died very young. That’s the phenomenon of his case. You can nonetheless listen to Mozart, you won’t die straight away, but he’ll still give you a lot of energy and a lot of vitality. Do it — you’ll never listen to it enough. Another music built on rhythm and on breathing is Gregorian chant. Mozart has this extraordinary quality: not only does he play on the whole ear, but he makes us feel everything the ear can give us. The ear, as I told you a moment ago,

has two devices: one that turns out to be the vestibule, the other that turns out to be the cochlea. The vestibule is the most archaic part; it is made of two devices — the organ, one part called the utricle, the other the saccule. The utricle is made for the horizontality of the head; it’s true that listeners have a well-defined posture. Secondly, the saccule is made to ensure verticality; it’s true that listeners have a verticality of the trunk. What’s more, the nerve that drives the stirrup muscle is the nerve that drives all the muscles of the face. For the ladies who are here, they who know how to make sounds will see their wrinkles disappear. For the men, it’s the same,

it’s the best face-lift; it’s the same nerve that activates the stirrup muscle and that will activate, at a given moment, all the muscles of the face. You have a fine image of it in poor André Sauvé — we need only take Beethoven’s head, which had shrivelled at a given moment like a wrinkled apple; but he made every gesture that rendered him more and more deaf without realising it. Had he done the opposite, he might have played differently — which would have been a pity for us, because he left behind beautiful things. By contrast, if you look at Mozart’s face, there was nothing; on the contrary, there was a very open brow and not a single wrinkle anywhere. Well, I think, before you ask me questions,

that we must make the public authorities aware. I’ll tell you straight away, it’s a long-haul wearing-down. I myself began fighting against noise around 1950 or so. I’m at it a long while, and discouraged. But some time later I managed to get occupational disease finally recognised, so as to obtain compensation for the wretched. Even so, it’s very difficult. Let me give you something that, unfortunately, happened. Impossible to get acceptance for a wretched man who was going deaf on the jet engines that one day he might have the chance to be reimbursed for anything at all. And I consulted in several arsenals, and suddenly I learned from the colonel who was there that someone had at last just been accepted for occupational deafness.

For me, that was joy, that was the culmination. Now, it was the secretary of this good colonel who had been accepted as deaf because she typed on the typewriter. So, typing on the typewriter, it had made her deaf. So I asked, of course, to examine her ear. The finest thing was that she had an otosclerosis. That is, nothing to do with the phenomenon of occupational deafness. She had a deafness that is operable, that has nothing to do with it — one was transmission, the other was perception. She’s the only woman I’ve seen straight off benefit from a state pension for occupational deafness. It’s true that one can wear oneself out with a typewriter. We no longer have them now, so much the better.

But a typewriter, the tap-tap-tap-tap seems like nothing. These are what we call transients. It’s a brutal sound, and the ear cannot bear transients. It hasn’t the time to defend itself. Even if you send a very bright beam very fast into the eye, it hasn’t the time to control itself fast enough. There’s a latency time. It is 19 milliseconds for the ear. It takes 19 milliseconds to prepare the ear. But once the click has gone off, it’s certain that the ear has worked for nothing. So one has to civilise the public authorities. But don’t be afraid — you’ll waste your time, but you have to keep at it, and since the government changes, you start again. It doesn’t matter.

But one day, you get there. No doubt they are weary. You have to keep going. You also have to make families aware. At present everyone is disturbed. They no longer understand anything. You meet your families; their child has destroyed himself listening to music that’s too rich. They’re the ones who’ll buy the future trumpet the following week. There’s nothing to be done. And why not each young person individually? When I take a young person and start to explain to him, when he begins to have a few troubles, there are a few who are just a little bit bothered. Perhaps it would be good if we — we who work in this field — at a given moment, took a little time

and put them for two quarter-hours on an ear that hears nothing, with wires, with an Electronic Ear. It’s easy to put the subject for a good quarter-hour as if he had ears like a hunting dog. When he lives inside that, he’ll realise into what universe he risks sinking. It has to be done. People have to be shown this dimension. The noises I’ve alluded to — you’ve seen — are industrial noises, today’s music and personal stereos. When the personal stereos appeared, I immediately saw the danger and I took the liberty of stirring up, in France, the management of Sony, whom I knew well. The director was very favourable to what I was saying,

to such a point that I prepared a dossier that went to Sony’s management in Japan. I was sent the reply that they couldn’t have cared less. The commercial interest was such that, as in my own story, it’s me they sent packing, not the personal stereo. So one was indeed cornered in the system. Now, a notion that’s interesting and that we must get into our heads — and people have thought it might be of service, since noise is so harmful, silence ought to be extremely beneficial. That seems logical. First of all, what is silence?

Can it be beneficial? People confuse silence — for them, it’s hearing nothing. That’s not true, there are thousands of silences. And if you like, sound, in fact — if you analyse it properly — is a modulation of silence. Here, for example, on the acoustic side, it’s fabulous: if the room were deaf, I’d be wearing my lungs out, and I’d see your ears stretching to listen to me. So there is, at a given moment, a considerable effort, and here, everything is given. It depends on the atmosphere, that. There’s a forest sound, there’s a silence, but a living silence. We need a silence that sings, so that life is dynamic, so that we are, at a given moment, always full of energy.

We need, at a given moment, something underlying, always ready. You’ve all entered a reverberant room; even if you make no noise, there’s something. In your bathroom, you feel like singing, because there’s a reverberation that occurs. Now, an experiment you can do — it can be given to everyone if you look a bit — is to enter what’s called an anechoic chamber, that is, one that gives no reverberation at all, none. A chamber that can give no echo, anechoic. Well, you’ll die. At a given moment, it’s terrible. I’ve done a lot of measurements inside, measuring microphones, measuring anything at all

in those chambers, for testing purposes. They are hyper-soundproofed chambers. You cannot — you cannot live inside. And yet there’s air, there can be as much oxygen as you want, but it’s an air that no longer vibrates, it’s a dead air. And you no longer feel it. Now, when we live, we are in a bath of stimulation that reaches the whole body, and remember that for it to work well, the Canadians who studied this problem say we must receive 3 billion stimulations per second, at least four and a half hours a day. That’s why, at a given moment, we need this noise to give the cortex vitality, to have this vitality,

to be at every moment full of creativity. If you don’t do that, if you’re not careful, if you soundproof things too much — it once happened to me, for example, in Paris, to be summoned twice by notaries who found themselves fatigued — to do, as I told you, I did a lot of soundproofing studies for the Arsenals, and there, those ones, you know them — they invited me, exactly: one a notary and the other a pupil of Le Corbusier. I treated Le Corbusier until the end of his life, and, well, small detail, he was deaf, you can see it every other day, with an execrable temper — I apologise because he was Swiss, but never mind, he was absolutely impossible to live with.

Well, the good Le Corbusier had a pupil who had found nothing better than to soundproof his room by putting — he had first made a kind of, he had put his office in a half-sphere, it’s very beautiful to see, but he made an error, which was that the wavelength inside it vibrated only in the low frequencies. And to have peace, he had put up two sloping carpets, in such a muffler, and he complained because he was tired. Well, he was tired because he no longer had any stimulation. Of course, I had the carpets taken off the walls, and then afterwards we found other ways to give a bit of sound to the room differently. The room must be alive — on that point, there’s nothing to be done.

If you go further, into sensory deprivation, well, there you have serious damage that can go into what’s called sensory deprivation, which can go as far as suicide. They had the famous expert — whom I knew well — supposedly say… He’s said to have concerned himself with the noise of whales in particular, and then to have concerned himself with dolphins. They had the expert supposedly say that the brain had no need of stimulation. He surely never said that. They credited him with it, and thanks to this saying, they manufactured enclosures to put people inside these enclosures in sensory deprivation. They put them in water, and they put them enough that they were in a state of gravitation,

such that there was no longer any stimulation caused by weight. They put them, of course, in silence, in the dark — in short, nothing stimulating. And then they thought they would reach something extraordinary — that is, to disconnect them so as to pass onto another plane, to make them enter that famous void that certain sects, unfortunately, seek in order for people to grow. It’s really flattening them definitively. There’s nothing left. And I’ll give you an example I lived through. Of course, fortunately — in one of these early times, there was the suicide. And the example I’m going to give you, I lived it close up, and it’s quite painful. I worked with a team from Lyon

on cancer. For reasons X — and I think my psychiatrist colleague agrees — cancer is a disease that is the integration of a great psychic illness. It’s the integration of a paranoid schizophrenia. It is better, once again, to develop an illness, a cancer, and to fight, which is dramatic, because nothing can be done. And we’ve seen today that the people who come into this field are always people who are afraid — afraid of pain, afraid of illness, afraid of everything. And they go off into an absolutely unreasoning world, which is that of psychiatry. The body — it no longer lets the body do its work. The body is intelligent. Suddenly, when one deviates, when one becomes unreasonable, it absorbs all our unreason

and gives us a psychosomatic illness. Well, working on cancer, having noticed this, in a great… There was a great man working with us, from Lyon, and we had noticed that in psychiatric hospitals there is never any cancer of the uterus, there is no cancer of the breast. So there was no fixation of an anxiety somewhere. The fact: there was a cancer, the subject is the subject. Already, when a psychiatric patient starts to catch a cold, things begin to go very well, he gets better. He comes out of his nightmare alive. Well, the psychiatrist arrived — there was a psychoanalyst psychiatrist who was with us in the research — and he said, that’s it, I’ve found something,

it’s the isolation tanks. As for me, I knew the isolation tanks in America, I said, watch out, here’s the danger. No, no, no, it’s fabulous; watch out, in any case I won’t do it to people without trying it. Right, be wary — the following week, he committed suicide. I mean, that shows how violent it is. So, at present, there still exist a few isolation tanks that would have charged very dearly for the right to commit suicide, but anyway they’ve modified their technique a little. They’ve lit the inside. They put soft music through. It’s better to be in your bathroom, it costs less and you have the chance to have a quite different landscape. In other words, I’ve laid out for you here

a little bit of all these remarks. I had to show you the importance that the pathology of noise carries. We never give it a thought. Remember again that it feeds many things, and above all, I’ve put it to you to make clear how high time it is to take alarm at it. How high time it is to defend ourselves against it. There, you can put to me any questions you wish. What is your view on the marginalisation of your therapy within the medical profession? That’s their problem and not mine. And whether they agree or not — for me, I’ve been living for 50 years thanks to research I did, and I stand on my own two feet only because I get results every day, and people can say what they like,

but with me it’s an open jar. There’s transparency, that’s the word people use now. Everyone can come and see. All those who reckon themselves up have never seen, never read, never done anything. And it’s true that I’m a nuisance. I’m a nuisance because I have ideas. Every time you have an idea, you’re in someone’s way. You have to get used to it. One day, they’ll come around. At present, they’re touting it in every corner, at Dr Hinault’s in particular, they’re touting the right ear. It’s I who discovered it 50 years ago. They’re discovering that the skin is starting to hear. I demonstrated it a very long time ago. They’re discovering

that intrauterine life exists. We’ve been talking about it since 1950. They’re discovering that the ear has the chance to perceive the pass-bands of living languages. They’re trying to apply it. I’ve been doing it since 1952. In short, everything. I think you have to allow for time. Now, to be more fair, I think they’re right. In the sense that I disturb them. I don’t know whether you’re a doctor or not, I know nothing. But medical studies are very difficult. Very long. And how many doctors arrive at the end of medical school completely exhausted. And they’ve never again opened a book in their life, saying “Great, I’ve finished.” Especially in ear, nose and throat. You still have four more years to get to it.

You learn that the ear works like this, this and that. Suddenly along comes some upstart saying “But no, that’s not it at all. It works otherwise. Everything has to be revised, everything started over. It’s hard.” At present, I think that with the techniques we have, I know how a human ear works, for example. Well, I wrote that book in… It’s called “Vertigo.” I wrote it in 1953. I was only able to publish it three years ago. Thanks to the barrier, it was possible. It came out all the same. The whole thing is to wait. So, I have the good fortune to have started very young. I began my research at 24. I have the good fortune to be still holding up

and seeing things come true little by little. But when I see the speed at which it’s advancing, I find it normal. The longer I live, the more patient I become. It’s all the more serious, the question you’ve raised. It’s that the one who suffers from the system is the wretched person who doesn’t want to come and face us, who cannot. No — well, as for the money business, as you put it, you don’t know the centres either. That also shows you’re not sufficiently informed. The Paris centre, for example, has never refused someone who has no money. Come with an ear that doesn’t work, and we’ll take you. I’m perhaps a bit too generous. From time to time,

my staff warns me that I’ve gone past the limits. But I’ve never yet been able to say “Go on, you’ll have to be seen elsewhere because you can’t pay.” Well, they don’t pay. I think that at present, if we don’t fight so that people… You have before you a colleague who is in Italy. He deals only with wretched psychiatric patients. Ask him how much he charges. Nothing. There’s a whole legend. At one point it was said that I charged 5 million, old francs, per client. It’s a pity it isn’t true. I wouldn’t be fretting from time to time about the end of the month. I think there’s a whole legend. It has to be said that those who set up centres —

there are 250 of them in the world, it’s not for nothing — don’t make a fortune with a centre. It keeps the people in them alive. It keeps them alive on two levels. It means they live. Financially, they manage to get over it. But above all, it keeps them alive through the chance of seeing a child who couldn’t walk stand up in 8 days. A child, you were told, who would never speak, who starts to speak. An autistic child you pull out of the hole. A psychiatric patient who becomes normal. That’s worth all the gold in the world. You don’t need money to have that satisfaction. That’s what keeps us on our feet. We know the way the child hears the noises of its mother and all those noises.

You said one day that one could reach the point where the mother hears the noises of her child, even to the point of receiving its death a few minutes in advance. It’s true. The problem arises for you too, very strongly. At present, we know where the sound passes to reach the foetus. It passes through the spinal column. It goes to join, at a given moment, the whole pelvis. The pelvis, when you take the measurements of all the sounds you send, even on the skull, the pelvis will, at a given moment, sing like a cathedral. There’s only one thing we won’t always be able to explain. Harmonics emerge that are always odd harmonics. It’s curious. Why? I have no idea.

But it’s true that for the woman who accepts her child — and the woman who accepts her child, you know well, you better than us, that she’s happy to show the child she’s carrying — she has a posture, it holds up well, she carries the child before her with pride. A mother who doesn’t want a child holds herself like this, she rejects it. And suddenly nothing more passes at the level of the spine. We have the same trouble too when a mother, for reasons X — medical, say — is obliged to lie down. The spinal column makes as many partitions as there are vertebrae. Because there, if she holds herself well, the vertebrae are linked to one another by a very strong muscular tension and it becomes a vibrating rod.

There, it works well and the information will pass. So you remember that we fight over knowing whether it’s the highs or the lows. And you also know there’s another question the obstetrician asks himself. I’ll put it to you too. Why, at a given moment, does the foetus change and turn head-down? Well, it reaches a term, around the eighth month, where it needs to hear its mother more and more. And for it, the best way is to go and place its head against the pelvic crown. And there, it will see the information passing at every moment. It’s in order to hear its mother. If it refuses her, it doesn’t turn. There can be incompatibilities. We fight over knowing whether it hears. Some claim it’s the lows; I claim it’s the highs.

I claim it’s the highs for two reasons. First, if you put through low frequencies, nothing happens clinically. As soon as you put through the highs, everything lights up. As soon as you put through the mother’s voice in the highs, the child comes alive again, it plunges back into its intrauterine life and all. Put through low frequencies, it falls asleep. Out. Secondly — but Retzius already knew it in the last century — you have, there, the head dissected in 1923, the ear of the foetus is much richer than the ear of the child later in sensory fibres. But its ear works like a filter. It cuts out all the lows. It cuts out all the lows, not in the human foetus alone, but in all mammalian foetuses. Without which life in a uterus is impossible.

You hear the noise of the mother’s belly, you hear the heart, you hear the breathing, the movements she makes, the movements the foetus makes, its own heart. It would make such a chaos that it’s unliveable. To bar all that, the ear works like a filter, it cuts everything off from 2000 hertz. That’s why it no longer hears anything but the highs. So life becomes — it’s purely a phenomenon of physiology. We know it: when a child is about to be born, it still doesn’t hear the lows. And we know it from the vocal-auditory contradiction. Before it takes on its adolescent voice, it needs 12, 13, 14 years. It’s at puberty that it will at last hear the lows, and its voice will, at a given moment, break toward the lows.

But at the start, it hears only the highs. That’s already the proof. So, I was telling you, it’s true that we try, by means of sound effects, but it’s hard to demonstrate because we don’t have a sensitive enough device, that the foetus is informing its mother about something. And the proof, you know it. It’s that when a mother loses her child, she knows it at once. So there’s something that has communicated. There’s another thing that is very troubling, and it must happen to you in your work more often than we can see. A child is perfectly happy to have its mother. And one day, no one knows why — it’s around 15 months to 3 years — it starts to cry terribly.

There’s no point doing any examination. The mother is pregnant. Suddenly, it has lost its mother. The mother is transformed. It’s the child who makes the mother. It’s the child who, at a given moment, completely transforms her. We need the laboratory test, the rabbit, the this, the that. The child knows it at once. A thousand very important things pass between two beings, and this phenomenon in particular. Professor, I had come here a little in the hope of getting to know a little of the Tomatis method, because I know nothing at all of this method. Can you tell us about it? At least I can tell you what kind of people it addresses. Whether one can help adolescents in difficulty.

Well, the easiest shortcut I can give you to get straight to it — it’s a bit like a soirée — and that is, we practise auditory pedagogy. We teach people to listen. From the moment the subject begins to listen, well, he begins to become human. To be human means to have the chance to communicate, to have the chance to be vertical, and to have the chance also to have a laterality that appears. Without language, you have no laterality. It’s an obligatory trilogy, a kind of speciation, which means you need the three elements to be able to end up as a human being. But to become a human being, you have to pass through a fair number of things. You already have to pass through intrauterine life.

If that goes well, well, you live in a fantastic paradise that belongs to you, with one small misfortune, which is that just when things are at their best, just when you’re at last the master of the kingdom, well, you’re evicted. We don’t yet know whether it’s rather the foetus that wants to come out, or the mother who asks. I think it’s the foetus that asks to come out. We see it, the difference, in premature babies in particular. The premature baby always has a lack, because it isn’t he who decided; he was put outside at the moment when he shouldn’t have been. I can speak of it, I am a premature baby — that’s perhaps why I’m always doing intrauterine life. Premature by six and a half months.

Well, there is therefore something there, I think, profound. If someone went through a drama at that moment, one can recover it by making him relive that period, and there are many premature babies we put back in the saddle, despite their little problems. Sometimes, unfortunately, they have problems that are much deeper, organic. There, we can help them. But if there are no other problems, we’ll recover them just by way of the mother’s voice or by the intrauterine input. Well, when you take the course of someone who lives in the wind, in the sea, who’s going to be born, who’ll then progress, you have stages. The stages work out well. It gives, at the other end, a man who’s well, a woman.

But if it doesn’t work very well, well, there’ll be stages. If the child is well in the uterus, things go well. If the mother is pathological, he’ll have problems. Especially if he’s an emotive one. If the mother is mad — that’s a rather broad term — well, he has a strong chance of being schizophrenic at birth. If he’s an emotive one. We call emotive the one who is intuitive. Anyway, the long thread-like type is quite characteristic. If he’s what we call a somatoid, that is, a body, well, that one couldn’t care less. In his whole life, provided he has enough to eat and sleeps well, his psychoanalytic life is sorted. So he doesn’t rack his brains. We’ll find him later.

Later, around forty, he won’t know how to recharge himself. He was the muscular one who made whatever he wanted. One day, he no longer has any muscle, he’s at a loss. Those ones, we’ll treat differently. At birth — birth is a big problem. If, at birth, one has certain temperaments, they tend to be paranoid, that is, they intellectualise everything. They desire certain things that they didn’t obtain. With a drama, which is that they’re always right. So it’s hard to treat them, since they’ll do something and they pin, at a given moment, their activity on foundations they believe to be true. That’s the autistic child. The autistic child is a child, by lineage, who is born

and finds that, deep down, the birth wasn’t what he wanted. He wasn’t received as he wished, and suddenly he’s going to punish his mother by no longer speaking. People have always said it. They say it was the mother’s fault. The mother can do nothing about it. What would you do faced with a child who refuses to speak to you, if he were your own? After some time, it’s dramatic. And the mother becomes the mother of the autistic child too. There’s a whole complication. In other words, the animal, which is the child, on the human level — on the animal level he’s fine, the mother too, but their relationship is dead. And it hasn’t lasted. Now, if everything goes well at birth, it goes well, there’s another cape to round.

It’s the one that will allow us to pass from the mother’s language, which is in every corner of the world, from China to the Caribbean. And it’s the same, it’s roughly “papa pipi-popo.” That’s the mother tongue. One day, you’ll have to pass to another language, and that’s the father’s. It’s the first foreign language, the social language. There’s a problem there. If the mother gives up the child, she gives it, she founds it, on the father, for the father is the one who will decide the language. The mother, she knows how to make the child, gives it her love. It’s enormous, the relationship there is between mother and child. But she cannot make it grow beyond this potential. Whatever she does, in the modern world,

we see it, the damage we have, is that there is often no father. We are very young. If there’s no man’s voice, the child has a strong chance, if he’s an emotive or a paranoid, of going astray, of having big difficulties. A man must speak. If a man speaks, everything will sort itself out. The man is the one who’ll give the passport to start out. It will happen, start out a little bit toward two, four years, and especially between five and seven years. Well, if the child who begins to speak enters into a term that is amusing, which is called babbling — babbling, that’s an old Flemish word meaning to be talkative. When the child starts to recite his “papa pipi-popo,”

he becomes talkative. Well, you’ll have to pass to normal language. If the mother holds him too much, to please him, he’ll stay a “papa pipi-popo caca,” if you ask me, but he’s a stammerer. Stammering is the chronicity, at a given moment, of babbling. But it will prevent him from growing. It will lock him in and will give him almost a clinging to death. It’s hard to be a mother at that moment, if one doesn’t understand that the child has to grow. We help mothers a great deal. When we treat a child, we treat at once, we take the mother at the same time to relieve her anxiety and so she understands what we’re doing to the child. By showing her clearly that a child of this kind doesn’t love his mother. An infant, it doesn’t love

its mother very much, it eats her up. It does her a fine poop on the way out, it can step on her. You then have the slightly bigger child who… The adolescent, often, is odious. To love your mother, you have to be an adult. When we prepare the mother to be soon the one we’re going to love, it helps us a lot. That’s why we’ll treat her at the same time as the child. And now if the stage is passed, language is integrated — not very well, with a few difficulties, because the father has too big a voice. He’s always going at the wife. He behaves badly. The child will reject this father a little and will become, before the logos that is the father, who is the law — and the letter — he’ll become handicapped

in all his dimensions. He’ll be dyslexic, dysorthographic, all the “dys-es” on Earth that you can find. If you straighten the ear, it puts you back in order. Now if we go much further, there’s another stage that is very unfortunate and that also feeds psychiatry: it’s a child, very often, in a family where the mother, for reasons X, wants to divorce or whatever, doesn’t get on with the father because he’s a drunkard, because things aren’t going well — anyway, anything, anything one can invent — and who starts, in front of the children, to say your father this, your father that, look what he’s doing, look what he’s doing. If the child believes the mother — he’ll believe her at once —

he’ll reject the image of the father. And there, that’s the drama. The father is the child’s becoming. One never touches the image of the father. If he’s not there, you say he’s travelling. If he’s not there, you say he’s gone to work elsewhere. You have to find an excuse, but never bury it. It’s not the father as such, and whether one likes it or not, we are symbolic animals somewhere. The mother is the past. The mother is the earth into which we sink. The mother is the house, it’s that fantastic uterus that sustains us. The mother, one day, is the bursting of the cosmos. And the father is the solar image, it’s the becoming. It’s what will allow us to grow. At present, unfortunately,

thanks to today’s upbringing, we kill father and mother. Perhaps analysis has helped in this. You kill father and mother, the subject dies at the same time. There’s nothing to be done. There’s a dynamic to life. He’s the one who’ll dynamise it and give the child this desire to do, this desire to grow, this desire to act. There are sayings, like the Jewish sayings that always say “listen and act.” I have an Israelite friend who always tells me what bothers him is that he acts and listens afterwards. At any moment, we have the chance to be able to start from intrauterine life, and depending on the stage we’ve observed — if the child is only dyslexic, we won’t stay long in intrauterine life,

we pass through but we make him relive it. Why? Because lesions occurred, unpleasant things occurred, troubles occurred, and the child has trouble letting them rise. To help him with this, we’ll make him start from zero and he takes another path. People were afraid of these things, saying it’s a regression. No — regression, that’s a word one ought to abolish. Regression is a big psychiatric term that means practically a dissolution of the brain. By contrast, when you make someone hear the intrauterine voice, everyone would have the same reaction. It’s a fantastic past of something that is a memorisation reappearing. We follow it through the drawings.

The drawings give us the chance for the subject to let himself be carried through everything we put through — whether the mother’s voice in intrauterine version, or Mozart. And everyone, with his own genius, his own skill, will draw the same themes. The same theme in intrauterine version, the same theme for birth, the same right up to the approaches of language. It’s such an experience. In adults, how does one proceed? An adult — either he’s found his bearings, he botched his entry, he’ll have a puberty like the ones we have now, and then afterwards, troubles with drugs or whatever, we have more and more of them. We haven’t cured people of drugs, but we give them the strength to get themselves out of drugs.

Once again, the big element we’ve brought is that the ear is a dynamo that allows the brain to be always recharged. The more your ear works, the more you listen, the more you participate, and the more you have the chance, at a given moment, to engage with things, and the more you have the chance to make yourself understand — your vigilance increases, and thanks to that, you have the chance to operate and to be always present. A subject who wants the strength to get himself out of his drug, with sounds, always gets there. We still have a lot of heroin addicts in Paris at present. We also have heavy pathologies, and we don’t save them. We allow them to fight against the illness.

We now have another spectrum of patients, of samples, which is that of retirement. Retired people. Retirement is death for a brain. For a brain, there is neither retirement nor holiday. The more it works, the better it fares. At present, for a long time, we’ve got into the habit of putting people into retirement. They let it happen as something to wish for in life. Anyway — to settle into a good chair in one’s house and watch the cars go by. It’s dramatic. Before, they spoke. People spoke to them. They had a charge. There were sounds all the time. Suddenly, they enter into silence. After some time, the ear drops. They drop very quickly. They are very small muscles.

They drop very quickly. They are in sensory deprivation. The brain disengages and they are completely annihilated. We know a great deal about it now. There’s a whole innovation. People who were put into early retirement. But they do the same thing. When a subject tells you “What are you doing?” — well, I do my garden. But that’s not enough. Whether he was a company director, whether he spoke, or whether he was anything at all. Or else the other one who tells me — it always leaves me a bit dumbfounded — “Now, I have the chance to be able to play bridge all day long.” But to have 100 billion cells in a single one only to play bridge all day long, that’s appalling.

All the more so as the brain — our brain — does not belong to us. It belongs to humankind. The brain was made to help others. When we’ve dynamised people and they’ve no longer understood what we were doing, they’ll set off again like good pilgrims to fight to help others. In France, it was very difficult to get people of a certain age — because they had their pension — even to start doing something extra. Not that they were afraid of retirement, but in France, the giving of something had become impossible until a few years ago. They would never have offered an hour to someone else to help them. Now I manage to set off some phenomena.

It’s better that the subject draw his pension and do something useful. Useful to others, even if it’s voluntary work. If the Swiss are more given to volunteering than the French — in France, it’s hard to set off. By contrast, I found a great deal of volunteering in America. In Canada, I saw extraordinary volunteering for handicapped children. I had in mind a centre I’d visited with my wife in Saskatchewan, which was as follows. There were 400 patients. That’s it, 400 patients. And 450 nurses. Already, that was well done. 400 handicapped children, but very handicapped. Or nearly. Every kind of illness. It’s the most dramatic thing you can imagine. But there were 450 volunteers on top.

It always leaves one dreaming. I always think of that centre, because I think it’s unique in the world. There you have what we do. So, how do we operate? The detail is a little further on. We have a machine called the Electronic Ear. It’s simply, at the start, when we set it going, the wish to make what is called, in research terms, a simulator, a device that worked in the manner of the middle ear. It’s the middle ear that will allow us to cock the ear, to tense the body. It’s the ear that will allow us to put ourselves into listening. And now we are so sure of the auditory function that we can claim to have,

not a simulator, but a model of the human ear. As they say, it’s a device that knows how to listen. If you don’t know how to listen, we put you in parallel. After a few days, the musculature will play and you’ll learn to listen. To set muscles playing, we need dumbbells. These dumbbells are either Mozart, or the mother’s voice. You know everything, I don’t feel like telling you. Isn’t there also a great danger with verbiage? That is, that speech becomes noise and that, precisely, the child no longer has any attention toward what is most noble in man, that is, speech, hence thought. Hence intellectualism, verbiage. And the other thing: have you thought

also about poetry? About poetry? That is, that not only do you treat with musical sound, but also with poetic sound, that is, with the poetic sonorities of a Verlaine or a… there. There, what I did a moment ago, I had withdrawn, I had made a whole section for language, precisely. I thought I was going to overstep people’s interest a little. I didn’t speak of it, but you’re right to raise the problem. It’s certain that language is even more traumatic than noise. At a given moment you touch, you make vibrate, you set into resonance precisely that pneumogastric nerve that can murder you. There are two words among the autistic,

you can kill him, so you have to be very careful. Speech can be harmful. Now, poetry is also fantastic, it is a music first, but it can also be dangerous. It depends, at a given moment, on the hook. The danger is to hear something beautiful and for it to be insidious and let the message through. If you read Verlaine, it’s certain that, at a given moment, it’s difficult. If you also read other authors who may already be in difficulty with themselves, you likewise risk passing it on. Like the kinds of music. If you put through, for example — instead of putting through Mozart, which is what we do — you put through Schumann, well, from time to time,

the subject comes out despairing. You put through Chopin — how beautiful it is. One can love Chopin at a given moment. We perhaps wouldn’t listen to Chopin all day long. You put through Chopin, you have children who burst into tears straight away. On the contrary, with Mozart, they’re in paradise. You take an autistic child who is closed to everything. You put through Gregorian chant for him, and he becomes absolutely transported straight away. It’s very powerful. We have the machine, there’s a jack that connects with two earphones. You pull the jack, he settles. You put the jack back, he sets off again. So it’s really immediate. Would other kinds of music have rendered us service? Surely. Why did we settle on Mozart?

It’s because in every corner of the world, it gives us the same result at the same speed, always with the same repercussions. It’s a universal. By contrast, other kinds of music would surely have worked. Monteverdi is surely an initiate, or in any case an adept of music. I can’t use him because he, for his part, used voices. There, I’m dependent on voices, and that answers what you were saying. It depends on the intonation of the voice, the quality of the voice, the side, or the stridency, of the voice. It depends on a great many things. But the insidious side of poetry — whereas I think the summit of poetry is no doubt what is highest on the plane of creativity. It’s a kind of resonance with the cosmos.

But when its resonance revolves only around the navel of the one who writes it, like Verlaine, it’s certain it risks being dangerous. You have the same thing with Baudelaire. As soon as Baudelaire wrote fantastic things, from time to time, he trembles in the mire for us. You can’t read him all the time. Have many poets written as well? We have no idea. You have the good fortune to have kinds of music that managed to combine the two. If you have Duparc’s “Invitation au voyage,” you could recite it to yourself, but once you’ve heard Duparc, you no longer want to take it out of Duparc’s musicality. Duparc had such a sensitivity that he made it so that now, when you think of the “Invitation au voyage,”

you have the musicality in your blood, coming back all the time. You have the same thing for Fauré. Fauré too ended up writing things that can no longer be recited without passing through him. I don’t know German well enough, not sufficiently in any case, to appreciate German books in their semantics. It’s certain that when you translate a German book, it no longer means anything. There’s a kind of cohesion between the musicality and the rest. One doesn’t see how one can recite or say things otherwise. If I used other kinds of music, I’d have to amuse myself with a scissors, cutting out little rounds to take the part that is beautiful. You could do the same thing with Baudelaire.

There are things that are fantastic. That’s what happened — this clinging to God, so rarely, so close. There was a devil pulling him so hard from below that, at a given moment, he sank without zigzagging, but with a pain. It’s poignant to read him. Verlaine is a bit more odious sometimes. When he shows himself odious by being deliberately, and not painfully, in the miasmas, it’s not very good. It’s the young person who opens those pages. Fortunately, the choice isn’t always made on that basis. Now, people take pleasure in drawing the young toward that, but I agree with you that we destroy more with language, often, than with the rest. A father, we were speaking of it a moment ago,

who lets fly three words with violence at a child — it’s dramatic. When you cited this, you fall into the domain of the emotives. The one who loves music, who creates all that, is in the emotive. He’s someone more dramatic still in his lived experience, because he cannot bear the lie. When he’s told “your father is an imbecile,” if the mother says it, it’s over. The father is an imbecile. The mother cannot lie. If the father tells his child “your mother is this,” he can’t — it’s over, he believes. He’ll build illusions upon illusions, but he’s a child who doesn’t know how to lie, and everything he’s told is gospel truth. There lies the drama. And always by way of the channel of the famous pneumogastric nerve

that governs all the viscera. — Can you indicate to us, repeat for us, the work and research you did on the learning of another language, the ease or the difficulty one has in learning another language? — That’s it. — The European languages, the European or world languages? — The European languages — there’s no such thing. It’s our ear that reveals languages to us. It’s different. In every corner of the world, the ear is not “an ear.” There’s no link. The root for an ear — the ear of a yellow, a black or a white person is the same. I’m not talking about pathological cases. There are people who are born without an ear. Normally, the ear is good.

Unfortunately, it’s plunged into an environment that will be, first, an acoustic environment. The air of Japan doesn’t vibrate like the air here in Switzerland. It doesn’t vibrate the same in France, any more than in England. And the apparatus of communication will be obliged to adapt to this phenomenon. At present, the element of communication between the two of us — it’s your ear that wants to listen to me and my ear that wants to speak. No, it’s the air between the two. You cut off the air and there’s no one left. Neither you nor I in language. So there’s a relationship that is always established thanks to the surrounding air. If we amuse ourselves by changing this air — which is easy to do in a laboratory, by changing the impedance, by changing the sonority,

by drawing in more silence, by giving more reverberation — suddenly our language will change. Let me give an example. If you take a German from the North who has no nasal, if you take a Neapolitan who doesn’t nasalise at all, you put all three of them in Canada — after some time, all three nasalise. They nasalise automatically because the air of the place sings nasal at 1500 hertz. So now, if you have a difficulty with languages, it’s not because you’re not gifted, it’s because your brain doesn’t want to work — which is always a bit disobliging to believe — it’s because, at a given moment, because you’ve been conditioned by the air of the place,

and by the culture, and by everything that is heard, you’ve been conditioned to take only a slice of this ear. I speak of French, for example — the French are very little gifted for languages. The French only hear over one octave, and they can learn nothing else. They defend themselves by claiming their language is the most beautiful, and that’s all it can contribute. But you take a Slav, the Yugoslavs or the Russians in particular, they hear over eleven octaves. The Portuguese learn over eleven octaves. They learn every language without leaving home. You have Portuguese peasants who speak French without an accent, without anything. And English is no problem either. In other words,

it’s a matter of diaphragmatic openness of the ear. A moment ago, I was telling you about the two little muscles of the ear; they’re the ones that open or close the diaphragm. If you now manage, electronically, to make it change, to open it or not, you have the switch from one language to another with ease. The English that resists you — within a few days, you already have words that come out the English way. It goes extremely fast. If you already have a strong notion of English, that you read it, you write it, and every time someone speaks to you, you’re completely bewildered, and every time they make you repeat the same thing — that disappears within the week. It goes extremely fast.

You begin to hear in manner 2, your ear gives you your self-control in manner 2. It’s very quick. Afterwards, it isn’t forgotten, you have the notion of the distance there is in passing from one language to another. We see it in children, multilingual ones. I always tell parents to each speak their language of origin. The father is, I suppose, American, the mother is German, and the child is in France. I ask each of them to speak their language, and the child learns French with ease. He learns three languages, but he switches from one language to another without difficulty. We had, at one point, a whole colony of Spaniards who came to work in France, 20 years ago, 25 years ago,

more than that, 30 years, 35 years ago, when I was working on this — Spanish children who learned French with a certain ease. And then, one fine day, they became dyslexic. And the inquiry was easy. The parents, to help the child, tried to jabber French as best they could. Spanish is closed to languages too. The result: they were handicapped, the child confused the two languages, he was as bad in Spanish as in French. We asked the parents to speak their language, above all not to speak French — but the child spoke French at school. In Spain, we have friends here who come from Catalonia, and they know how much difference there is

between Catalan and Spanish. The Spaniard has a lot of trouble learning anything at all, whereas the Catalan, who has a language, a very open ear, can learn any language. So — a diaphragmatic openness. We did the Tomatis method — does it last, or must the method be redone for a child or for an adult? In the child, it lasts permanently, unless the parents understand nothing and the sky falls on his head. It falls on his head every three evenings. When everyone is well guided — no, it lasts. In the adult, we go further. We never abandon an adult without giving him keys so that he can carry on himself. That’s crucial.

You do a course, that means your ear doesn’t work well. You feel like singing, for example, like doing anything at all, making music. The difficulty is to understand that it touches everything. Because ear, and nervous system — it goes even further. If you look at phylogenesis, when the ear begins to appear, it’s the first to come. The brain follows after. Each time the ear becomes more complex, the brain grows more complex. There’s a parallelism that runs along ceaselessly. When you’ve understood that, you understand the whole story. And from the educational point of view, once the subject is known — but it goes fast, we don’t much like to draw them

into treatments that are too long. I rather like people’s freedom. As I like my own. In other words, I want to free them straight away from the therapeutic relationship, which is as constraining as the rest. They’ve already had papa and mama on their back, they have school, the government, and all the rest that one stops. We’re going to treat them. Once the ear is good, we teach them to maintain their ear themselves. We show them how to do it, how to speak, how to read, and so on. We teach the ear to train itself. It’s interesting to see, electronically — I arrived at the same conclusion — the ancients said it all. You read Aristotle, he tells you what must be done for the rest. He wrote a book called the Rhetoric;

if one day you have a little time, read it. But there’s a pupil who is even more loquacious on the question, who was Cicero. He wrote four volumes on the De Oratore. He tells you how to place the hand to speak, how to stretch the lips, how to make the movement of the face, he tells you everything. That’s what we teach people. Then we go further by creating what’s called an audio-vocal course, that is, we teach people a great deal about the right ear in relation to language, and many, after 4 or 5 days, begin to make sounds on Tosca with some ease.