Music and Its Neuro-Psycho-Physiological Effects

“Music and Its Neuro-Psycho-Physiological Effects” — such is the theme selected by the Steering Committee of the ISME from among those I had proposed to address on the occasion of this Congress. Beneath this title, somewhat forbidding, I concede, the aim is in fact to develop a reflection on music as it stands before the human person, the very subject of this international gathering. But each speaks his own tongue. And, in keeping with my speciality as an audio-psycho-phonologist, I am readily led to conceive of man in his human dimension as an immense listening ear, to which a nervous system is appended. This, moreover, is no mere fancy of the mind, and my address to you today will endeavour to bring you confirmation of it.

That music has effects upon the human organism is self-evident; I would go so far as to maintain that this is its very reason for being.

To be sure, the time allotted me to engage with this subject (whose vastness will certainly not have escaped you) will compel me to resort to many a shortcut. But if I am thus led to evoke only the essential, my concern will nonetheless remain not to distort the reflective idea which for some thirty years has sustained the clinical approach and underpinned the experimental research. It is quite evident that the prime motive of this whole investigation has held firm, in a constant manner, in the profound desire to come to the aid of all those who, on the plane of communication, have seen their world disturbed, the final aim consisting above all in ensuring their insertion into the human group. Our discipline, audio-psycho-phonology, which is now widely disseminated and which interlocks with various branches of the human sciences, set out at the start upon certain research concerning singers, then musicians, and finally voice professionals. It subsequently entered numerous fields of investigation bearing upon the relational processes of the human being with his environment, notably by means of language.

The results acquired, for the most part accepted and become classical, now rest:

1st. Upon the demonstration of audio-vocal feedback, revealing that any modification brought to bear on the auditory supply determines a transformation of the phonic or instrumental emission, and this according to certain laws, cybernetically and neurologically controlled.

2nd. Upon the actual presence of a musical ear. It is characterised by an ascending auditory response curve of at least 6 dB/octave, capable of reaching 12 to 18 dB/octave, that is to say a curve progressing by 100, 200, or 300 % per octave. The profile of the slope is thereby known. This ascent takes place from the frequency of 500 Hz up to 2000 Hz. Beyond 2000 Hz, the curve traces a dome rising as far as 4000 and sometimes 6000 Hz.

Endowed with these characteristics, the ear is surely musical in the broadest sense of the term. Indeed, the subject so endowed loves music, reproduces it with accuracy, and renders it with quality. This is all the more real in that any disturbance introduced into the curve of hearing, in other words into the audio-vocal control, immediately entails the loss of the qualities indicated above.

It should be noted that the characteristics which so specifically define the musical ear have real implications only when they are seated in the right ear, called the directing ear. This brings us to introduce the third parameter.

3rd. Upon the discovery of a directing ear, the right one, leading us to reconsider the knowledge relating to the inter-hemispheric dialogue and to revise the notion of a focalised centralisation of cerebral activity upon the cortical layer, so as to attain the stage of what we have called the “neuronic integrators,” vast cortico-centrencephalo-cerebello-spinal sensori-motor fields.

4th. Upon the description of the characteristics which tend to differentiate the various manners of hearing, and to explain in this way the neuro-linguistic, even psycho-linguistic, barriers that may become established between the different ethnic groups. Each idiom is in fact individualised through the interplay of three parameters which designate the ethnic ear:

• the one determining the diaphragmatic aperture of the spectrum of hearing, what we have called the pass-band,
• the second answering to the slope of the frequency-envelope curve within this pass-band,
• the third evoking the latency time necessary for the two preceding accommodations (for they are indeed accommodations) to fall into place.

5th. Upon the bringing to light of the fact that every disorder of oral or written language finds its origin in a disturbance of listening. This observation is evidently the counter-proof of the existence of the audio-vocal circuit. A scale of “hearing-language” correspondences is at present sufficiently substantiated for one to be able to determine, from a test called the Listening Test (LT), what the psycholinguistic behaviour of the subject examined may be, viewed under all its aspects: phonic, phonetic, linguistic, psychological, postural, corporeal, instrumental, somatic, and so forth.

6th. Upon the certainty of the correction of the disorders enounced above through the intervention of a pedagogy of listening, electronically controlled, which, taking up again the ontogenetic and phylogenetic course of this function, revives the evolutive processes that lead to the awakening of the desire to communicate. It is upon this last element that the function of listening will be established, the function that will transform the ear into what it is, just as it has taken hold of the mouth, the tongue, the larynx, the respiratory apparatus, in order to realise, in an astonishing synergy, the phonatory and speaking apparatus.

7th. Finally, upon the prodigious plunge into the sonic uterine universe which, while delivering the keys to the mechanisms of language and revealing the various factors of human speciation such as verticality and laterality, brings to light the archetypal embryonic and foetal memorisations, so many processes grafted onto the programmed evolution of the auditory apparatus in its progress toward the realisation of listening. From this vast field of intra-uterine investigation, in which we have been engaged for nearly twenty years now, the sensori-motor analytico-synthetic approach that has stemmed from it has afforded us means of action, hitherto unrecognised, upon schizophrenia, autism, and a fortiori upon the minor handicaps, as well as upon certain behavioural disorders such as epilepsy.

You are now provided, then, with sufficiently substantiated elements of information to allow you to enter a universe disconcerting at first sight and, in any case, unusual. I remain persuaded, however, that you will soon, if not adopt its terminology, at least retain those points of insertion which, for the most part, attach to your own domain, that of music.

No doubt the difficulty encountered in apprehending such an approach is bound up with the resistance one feels at venturing into the auditory labyrinth and at confronting the arcana of the nervous system. And yet, one must engage with it; I would even say, let oneself be drawn into it without any fear. It is evident that the auditory system has action only because it is connected with the nervous system. It pleases me to affirm that the latter is in some sense annexed to it. It is true that phylogenesis helps us to maintain this hypothesis. It leads us there with all the more ease in that everything reveals to us, within the framework of a longitudinal study concerning evolutive phenomena, that the organs which intervene in the establishment of the ear in its vestibular and cochlear function always precede those that will give rise to the nervous system in general. This sort of parallel and conjugated progression introduces a dialectical interplay between the two formations, and it is from such a dialogue that one succeeds in better apprehending the structural functional dynamics of the whole of the nervous system, and notably that of the important emergence of the encephalic portion.

As for the ear, it doubtless appears as a complex, mysterious organ, eluding every searching investigation, keeping certain of its mechanisms jealously buried away the moment one takes to seeing in it nothing but the apparatus of listening; the same approach is met with when one persists in considering the tongue solely as an apparatus of phonation. The latter certainly plays a role in the language function, but it is first and foremost a digestive organ. Such a conception, established upon well-determined anatomical, embryological, and physiological bases, allows one to institute a better knowledge of the secondary adaptations elicited by the act of speech.

The ear does likewise; it holds, at least at first approach, a function altogether other than the one habitually attributed to it. The labyrinthine apparatus is of course destined for listening, but it exercises, in the foreground, a fundamental activity upon which it is necessary to insist. Indeed, it is upon this first, essential activity that the whole understanding of the mechanisms of the ear and of the effects of music upon the human person will depend.

The ear ensures the cortical charge. It is a generator of energy. It has a dynamogenic power which it has held since the most distant ages of the animal lineage. It attains these results by acting on several planes:

1st. It centralises, at the level of the vestibule, the information coming from the whole body (skin, muscles, joints, and bones) by means of the sensory effectors derived from the generative cells of the ear, those of the organ of Corti in particular.

2nd. It induces the postures that render this centralisation more efficient, notably in the antigravitational struggle, again through the vestibular interplay, that is to say at the level of the utricle surmounted by its semicircular canals, and of the saccule.

3rd. It regulates, in the cybernetic sense of the term, the function of listening so as to increase its efficacy still further, and this thanks to the cochlear apparatus.

This incidence of charge is too important for us not to dwell upon it for a few moments. Indeed, this dynamogenic function is fundamental, though almost wholly ignored. And yet it brings us squarely into our subject, that of the effects of music upon the human body.

Let me explain: it is known that everything that lives, vibrates, and that everything which organises itself so as to attain a reflective participation in that immanent presence which is life, manifested by rhythms, by cycles, by sequences, orients itself toward the elaboration of the nervous system. Everything that lives emits, in the most ontogenic sense of the term, its own vibratory sequence, its own music, in a manner of speaking. Thus music in turn ensures a particular action upon this living matter, either by activating and vivifying, or by diminishing and annihilating, the existing vibratory physiological functions.

Everything demonstrates to us at present that the activity of the nervous system is bound up with the number of stimulations it receives, metabolism in sum ensuring only the share of vegetative maintenance, without being able to associate with it the reflective dynamic. The latter, developed to its maximum, will allow consciousness to spring forth, consciousness of which it is an embryological emanation.

Henceforth, to be conscious is to be, that is to say to participate in the immense universe that surrounds us, envelops us, invites us to dialogue by bombarding us with a thousand stimulations. To be more concrete, we may refer to the latest scientific works carried out in this domain, which have demonstrated that the human nervous system must, in order to attain the levels of wakefulness, collect three billion stimuli per second for at least four and a half hours a day. Now, it is through the intermediary of the ear, and in a proportion of more than 90 %, that this charge in nervous influx is ensured.

A few particulars concerning the auditory apparatus and the nervous system now seem necessary to us in order to better understand the processes evoked above.

The human ear is constituted, according to the classical conceptions, of three parts: the external ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. My opinion consists in thinking that there exist, on the neurophysiological plane, only two parts: the external and the internal. I have explained myself on this in various works, and notably in the one dealing with listening. For the moment, and so as not to overstep the bounds of this exposition, we shall concern ourselves with the inner ear. It comprises, within one and the same envelope (the labyrinthine vesicle), two ensembles having apparently different activities: the vestibule and the cochlea.

1st. The vestibule, the most archaic of these two elements. It is composed of the utricle furnished with its semicircular canals, and of a second pouch, the saccule, appended perpendicularly in space to the utricle.

2nd. The cochlea, of more recent emanation. It organises itself beneath the saccule into a helicoidal, snail-shell form.

According to the classical conceptions, the roles attributed to the one and to the other of these two elements made of the vestibule an organ specialised in the function of equilibrium, and of the cochlea an apparatus destined to ensure the recognition of sounds. In the course of these recent years, I have been led to call such a bipartition into question and to prove that the vestibule hears more than had previously been supposed, and that the cochlea too contributes to the function of equilibrium. It is therefore a matter of one and the same organ, whose action, on the plane of the analysis of movements and displacements, calls upon different arrangements.

In order that the responses be optimised, in the phenomena of charge for example, it is necessary that the ensemble acquire a determined spatial position capable of provoking a well-defined corporeal posture, the head in its postural situation drawing the whole of the body’s statics and dynamics into conformity with this favourable attitude. This attitude, which we have called the listening posture, will become established in such a way that certain sounds will have effects that certain others will not. It is thus that sounds rich in high harmonics will have an energising action on the plane of potential capitalisation: I have accordingly called them charge sounds. By contrast, other sounds situated in the zone of the low frequencies will exhaust the accumulated reserves, to the point of sometimes provoking the total exhaustion of the subject submitted to them: this is the reason why I have called them discharge sounds.

Sounds act upon the membranous labyrinth, itself enclosed within the ivory vesicle that is the bony labyrinth. The vestibule is set into activity by the liquid movements that sounds engender within it. Indeed, any sonic stimulation determines, at the level of the utricle and the saccule, an elastic pulsation which is translated into a mobilisation of the liquid called “endolymphatic” that fills the membranous labyrinth (as opposed to the liquid called “perilymphatic” that surrounds the latter). In the utricle, a circulation becomes established in keeping with the directivity and the intensity of the pulsation received, a circulation which finds its three-dimensional responses according to the three semicircular canals flanking the upper and lateral parts of the utricle and answering precisely to the three axes that normally define space: horizontal, antero-posterior, and transverse.

This being established, we shall say that the gestural, in sum semiological, as it were incarnate, value of the movements executed depends upon two facts:

1st. first and foremost, upon the corporeal responses, thanks to the irradiating innervation of the vestibule in the direction of the body;

2nd. secondly, upon the recall of a movement previously engrammed and controlled by the labyrinth.

It should be noted that, in this first phase during which gestural memorisation is installed, the endolymphatic liquid operates through its inertia, while the walls of the labyrinth are drawn along, together with the bony shell, by the movements of the body as a whole.

In other words, any acoustic impulse that determines a movement of the endolymphatic liquids has the chance of evoking in return the mnemonically incarnate image of a previously realised corporeal movement. This is all the more verified in that, from the vestibule, there issues what we have called an integrator. I shall call this one the somatic integrator. By the term integrator, I mean to designate the whole vestibulo-corporeal neuronic field which comprises, in fact, not only the vestibulo-spinal tracts but also the sensory and muscular corporeal responses that concern vestibular action properly speaking. This means that an impulse given to the vestibule by sounds sets off, at the level of the body, a determined action, for example a rhythm introducing a dance. We may therefore affirm that, through the vestibular memorisations and through the integrated interplay of acquired corporeal movements which have themselves provoked certain displacements of the labyrinthine liquids, the evocations will awaken in the body the dynamic image of the movement, to the point of imposing it upon it.

The neuronic ensembles called upon by the vestibular integrator are:

• the vestibulo-spinal tracts: homo- and hetero-lateral,
• the vestibulo-cerebellar, archeo-cerebellar tracts, in fact,
• and their annexes, or better, their complementaries,
• at the level of the cerebellar roof,
• in the tecto-vestibulo-spinal responses (through the nuclei of Deiters and of Bechterew),
• the tracts of Flechsig and of Gowers, which collect the sensory responses: both are in fact homolateral, despite the complex course of the latter of the two.

Through the intermediary of the cerebellar projections, the vestibule can centralise, at the level of the relay constituted by the cerebellum, all of its metameric action. And this thanks to the muscular feedbacks realised by the cerebello-spinal relays. To use a less technical language, we shall say that there does not exist a single muscle of the body that does not depend upon the vestibule. This element alone allows a better understanding of our personal conceptions, which tend to affirm that every sound has its corporeal resonance.

This action will moreover be reinforced at the level of the grasp of the body by the progressive intervention of the visual integrator. The latter, setting out from the retina, projects onto the calcarine zone, that is to say onto the posterior occipital area, there where visual information is collected. Its engramming will be all the more finely memorised in that an increase of the aim can be obtained. This realisation implies that the eye acquire a very exceptional mobility. Phylogenetically one sees it pass from its immobile lateral, in sum monocular, situation, toward a binocularity that will demand great agility in the syncinesias which will regulate the coupling of the aim by the two eyes in a concomitant manner. This particularly learned and highly elaborate assembly is achieved thanks to the subjection of the 3rd, 4th, and 6th cranial pairs, to which one may accessorily add the 11th pair, which will go so far as to mobilise the head if need be, in order to allow the subject to follow with his gaze the object situated in the surrounding field.

Thus, thanks to this integrator, the eye places at its service a muscular portion, the one relating to the eyes and the neck. This amounts to saying that this integrator uses, for one part, the vestibulo-spinal integrator. It will, moreover, in reality make use of the latter in a more extended manner, for the whole body is called upon to adapt itself so as to plunge its gaze into the universe in which it is led to evolve. This taking-cognisance of the environment is of great importance, for it allows the body to integrate itself into a milieu upon which it depends, while at the same time succeeding in discovering its individuality. There thus exists a dialectical interplay from which there shines through, to the point of becoming an evidence, the fact that the milieu exists only insofar as the individual is.

The balancing interplay of the objectifying-object, acquiring a power of crystallisation sufficient to attain the level of the objectifying-subject, is reinforced when the third integrator intervenes, which is the cochlear integrator. Let us recall that the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and even 11th pairs are directed intentionally by the oculo-cephalogyric tracts, an emanation of the geniculate bundle, that is to say of the portion born of the posterior frontal in its lower part. I have said “intentionally directed,” meaning thereby that the will intervenes by the channel of the aforesaid tracts, while the automatic dynamic of the eyes which animates the motor nerves finds its source in the vestibule, through the ascending fibres emanating from the nuclei of Bechterew and behaving like little primitive brains, operating, it is true, without intentionality.

Finally, let us say that the cochlear integrator, which is in direct connection with the encephalon (the neo-encephalon, which it precedes and which it seems to induce in its functional structuration), takes hold of this whole ensemble through the cochleo-thalamo-temporal tracts which, by return, intra-cerebralise themselves and consequently incorporise themselves through the channel of the tract of Turck-Meynert. This one then enters into connection with the centrencephalic ensemble and with an absolutely complete network of inter-reactions. Indeed, while it introduces itself into the pontine nuclei, it rejoins the cerebellum in its newly formed portion; thence it gains the dentate nucleus, or cerebellar olive, then rejoins the cerebral cortex in several places, while ensuring sites of communication with the red nucleus and the thalamus, which it traverses so as to reach the cortex in extra-pyramidal zones. These themselves function as motor zones upon which motricity is elaborated, it being understood that the latter remains at the stage of the automatisms, all intentionality answering to the dynamic field more specifically reserved for the pyramidal zone, that is to say to the one corresponding to the ascending frontal.

Thus, this vast integrator which sets out from the cochlea, the organ of sound, induces the temporal area, the site in which the auditory stimulation, transformed into a neuronic impulse, finds its projection. It then activates the whole centrencephalic totality, allowing the latter to mix, at the level of the cerebellum, with the image of the body previously projected and fixed by the vestibular integrator on the one hand (in its interior landscape, one might say) and through the objectal interplay of the visual integrator on the other, in its projection into space.

The vestibule thus organises the soma (or the “id,” in analytical terms), enriched by these various activities, notably by the one relating to the structure of the body image. The visual integrator contributes to the insertion of this id into the surrounding world and ensures for it its own situation, while the cochlear integrator gives it the possibility of knowing its measure, its dimensions, its limits, and allows it to accede to dialogue, that is to say to the integration of the surrounding world. It can then absorb the latter neuronically by engramming, by acoustically encoding within the totality of the nervous system what each object would have evoked in the body in a fleeting manner had it not had the support of the sonic evocation.

To this briefly evoked neuro-physiological fresco, it is fitting to add the vagal system, a veritable probe of the nervous system in the direction of the sympathetic. Let us recall that the latter constitutes a neuro-vegetative network which ensures, by its presence everywhere, the whole of the basic mechanisms: from the beating of the heart to respiration, by way of sleep, hunger, reproduction, and so on. Doubtless we may think that it is this system that attunes itself to the universal rhythms; doubtless it is within it that the fundamental sequences would have to be rediscovered. This pre-integrator, as it were, though independent, nonetheless throws a bridge, a junction with the rest of the nervous system, thanks to the parasympathetic nerve, or vagal nerve, or 10th cranial pair. Known also under the name of the pneumogastric, this nerve floods with its peripheral fibres the external auditory canal, the tympanum, and the cavity of the middle ear, while it innervates at the same time all the visceral tracts: pharynx, heart, lung, liver, kidney, anus. This shows the absolutely considerable importance it may assume with regard to any sonic event, through its action, conjugated or antagonistic, with the sympathetic. This sensori-visceral collateral that is the vagal nerve ought, in fact, to allow us to discover the deep physiological rhythms which, under another form, are cosmic rhythms. But its impregnation with information of all kinds, gathered from the very start of its entry into sensori-motor function, will cause it to deviate from its primary orientation and endow it with a dull, obscure, ill-defined heaviness, generative of an uncontrollable anguish. Through its immense territory of innervation, this nerve thus allows us to understand the manifold somatic responses that its entry into function, notably by the low-frequency sounds, may determine.

Finally, we shall conclude this neurological overview by specifying that the whole central nervous system is doubled by accelerators and inhibitors in the reticular substance, which seems to us to act through phenomena of induction at the level of the aforesaid integrators.

Thus, the whole dynamic of these integrators can manifest itself only through the correct setting-into-activity of the neuronic ensemble we have just evoked. Thanks to the movements executed, and taking account of their memorisations collected in the form of rhythms, of cadences, of sequences, the vestibule will introduce a sensitivo-motor, carnal in the true sense of the term, image of the corporeal instrument. The eye-vestibule association will organise the plunge of this body into the surrounding world and will awaken in it the knowledge of its relative positions. Finally, the cochlear integrator will give a final tint by according a sense to these rhythms, a value to these cadences, a signification to these sequences… It will thus prepare the being for the understanding of language, of that language which, in order at last to be absorbed and listened to, will have to wait until the aforesaid mechanisms are entirely set into place.

As I have often had occasion to say, it is the universe that modulates and that speaks. At its level, everything is music and everything is language. The difficulty will consist in preparing the human body to attain the plane upon which this dialogue is established.

It is in this that music occupies an essential place. It is not a mere fancy, a message reserved for an elite, the fruit of a culture.

It is a necessity.

It favours the crystallisations of the different structural functional phases of the nervous system.

It effects the maximised realisation of the charges bound up with stimuli, through the kinetic, static, antigravitational, and other interplays.

It prepares for song and for corporeal expression the human being who has let himself be impregnated by it.

It is, at least such is my conviction, pre-existent to language itself, as a structuring element taking hold of the body in its totality so as to model it into a verbalising architecture. It is from music that there are born the rhythms and the intonations proper to the processes of language.

As one sees, music begins at the very point where mystery becomes established, leaving us only to surmise that the sonic world is essentially called upon to translate, in its existential response, the vibrant and singing silence of the underlying inaudible, the incontestable manifestation of a reality inaccessible to our senses. Just as the visible reveals to us the invisible that underlies and sculpts it, so music answers to the song of a cosmos moving to the rhythm of a harmony that gives itself generously to a few chosen ones charged with transforming into audible sounds the sonic messages that the universe will have delivered to them.

But it will still be necessary to respect certain rules answering to the exigencies of a nervous system previously coded by its essential inducer, which proves to be, as we have seen, the auditory apparatus. So much so that we shall be able to affirm that every being on the way to humanisation is an ear, that is to say an antenna for the auscultation of the environment in which it is plunged. Music remains incontestably the most refined mode for setting this ambiance into resonance.

It is doubtless at this level that it would be well to define what music is. If the musician, the theoretician in the matter, were to permit us some incursion into his domain, we should know to murmur as discreetly as possible, so as not to merit the stamp of heresy, that there is first music, then the musics, next sonic languages, and finally acoustic experiences.

Music acts through its effects of interior harmonisation, that is to say through the exploitation of the primitive modes. In this, moreover, it seems to me to be “essential.” It elicits and awakens, to the point of rendering them in some sense tangible, the modulations proper to the sympathetic system.

The musics, in the second lineage, are the sonic arrangements which know how to superadd to these basic modes the rhythms of exterior life, those very ones introduced by society and culture, which range from gesture to language, and which in fact concern the whole of gesture. The folkloric elements are recognised as the first generators of these musics.

The sonic languages that are then inscribed bring concretely back to life the emotional states by interlocking all at once the evocative sonorities of accents perceived and engrammed in the centrencephalic affective nuclei that preside over neuro-vegetative life, and the rhythms drawing the body out of the previously normalised codings. There results from this a narrative structure, of sonic semiology, which expresses itself upon the body in all its external and internal dynamics.

Finally, there exist acoustic experiences. It is easy to perceive the level that must be attained in order to apprehend them, outside of any conception of listening. They have the merit of introducing into the sonic world new acoustic objects. The latter will in their turn, in order to be transcribed into corporeal memorisation, have to answer to the intrinsic data of the nervous system: without this, whatever the beauty they represent for their author, they will have no chance of being able to be integrated into a neuronic universality.

This incursion into the sonic world allows us to think that it is necessary to distinguish clearly the different musical expressions and to determine their neuro-psycho-physiological effects. It is at this level that our speciality, audio-psycho-phonology, intervenes in a decisive manner with a view to isolating, and thereby to better apprehending, the effects of sounds and, more expressly, of music upon the human organism.

The dynamogenic action of the ear is brought into relief thanks to electronic assemblies capable of eliciting the listening posture by privileging the sounds inscribed within a sonic volume whose form and density answer to the norms of the cells of the organ of Corti. Music (a certain music) then intervenes within a sonic programming taking account of the evolutive processes which, ever since intra-uterine life, must lead the ear toward listening, and more precisely toward the listening of language. A neuronic preparation proves indispensable in order to set into place the impulsional wave-trains called upon to convey, later on, the semantic information. This primordial, fundamental coding, the essential vector of a harmonious acoustic integration distributed throughout the whole nervous system and thereby throughout the whole soma, will allow the postures to be induced, notably verticality, the tonicity to be distributed homogeneously over the whole body set into listening, in sum to sculpt it so that it becomes a receiving antenna vibrating in unison with the sonic source, whether it be musical or pertaining to language.

To be more concrete, I propose to indicate in a few lines how we proceed in matters of the pedagogy of listening. By means of electronic assemblies, we bring back to life the intra-uterine auditory period, principally from the mother’s voice, which has been recorded and then filtered above 8000 Hz with a view to suppressing all semantic information and to restoring solely the affective charge which will come to elicit, accelerate, or restore in the subject the desire to communicate, the desire to live. It is through apparatuses using electronic gates, which train the ear to accommodate itself to listening, that these messages are transmitted.

After this phase, which we consider primordial, we proceed to a sonic birthing which in fact reproduces the event of birth on the acoustic plane and allows the subject to leave foetal hearing in order henceforth to adapt himself fully to aerial hearing. It is with the mother’s voice that we act, progressively un-filtering it through the Electronic Ear. When the maternal voice cannot be used (for various reasons upon which it is impossible for us to insist, for want of time), we proceed to this de-conditioning by means of musical sounds. After a long clinical experience and numerous laboratory trials, we have electively chosen the music of Mozart (above all the pieces for violin), for it alone gives us astonishing results, always positive, in every corner of the world and whatever the ethnic group concerned may be. It is in this that we can say of Mozart’s music that it is universal. This great composer was doubtless directly plugged into the cosmic rhythms which he was able to transcribe through a nervous system devoid of all egotic impregnation.

Mozart, retransmitted in filtered sounds (that is to say in intra-uterine sounds) and listened to under the Electronic Ear, thus becomes a vector of harmonisation, of dynamisation, of awakening, and of creativity. The responses are immediate: the subject becomes active, modifies his neurovegetative references, sees his respiration amplify, his pulse accelerate. He manifests a desire to communicate with his environment. His posture too is transformed and becomes that of listening. This music acts most particularly upon the flexors.

After the sonic birthing, and before introducing the subject into a semantic universe that risks being psychoanalytically charged with affective blockages (the very ones that have elicited our intervention as therapist), we continue to use music during a long pre-linguistic period which will allow the subject to prepare himself for dialogue with the other. During this phase, we use three sorts of musical sounds: Mozart, Gregorian chant, and nursery rhymes, while we train the right ear to become predominant. Laterality is established upon a right-handedness whose principal effects I have evoked in several works.

Why Mozart, why Gregorian chant, why nursery rhymes? There would be much to say on these various choices. What remains above all to be noted is that, over tens of thousands of cases (pathological and normal), the neuro-psycho-physiological responses have largely surpassed the scores already attained by the techniques habitually used. For Mozart, as I have already indicated, the pieces for violin (therefore containing numerous sequences rich in high-pitched sounds) are more efficacious. As for Gregorian chant, the modulations of the “Solesmes” type established by Dom Gajard constitute elements of choice. Indeed, the repertory transmitted by this indefatigable and brilliant researcher holds an incontestable universality and pedagogical and therapeutic efficacy. Contrary to Mozart’s music, Gregorian chant soothes, calms the heart and the respiration, at the same time as it solicits verticality, acting electively upon the extensors.

For children, at the same time as the two sonic elements previously evoked, we play nursery rhymes of the ethnic group to which the child belongs. This is very important and reveals to us to what point these children’s songs, which have crossed the centuries, constitute the very bases of the language that will later be used as a means of communication. They contain the structuring folkloric elements of the future language. German or Spanish nursery rhymes, for example, cannot in any case be applied to the education or re-education of little French children. The basic rhythms, corresponding to different neuronic codings, remain specific to each ethnic group. And even within one and the same linguality (the French-speaking world, for example), the nursery rhymes constitute particular elements that cannot be used from one country to another. Furthermore, for children presenting profound disorders of the personality (autism, schizophrenia…), we first play nursery rhymes on la-la-la with no semantic value, so as not to project the child into a linguistic dynamic that he has up to now refused. The rhythms that the nursery rhymes contain will prepare him to accept language progressively, with its psycho-affective incidences capable of transforming his relational universe.

Henceforth, after this meticulous preparation, the nervous system, having become a free and liberated integrative network once again, will be capable of receiving the linguistic assembly that the child or the adult will be able to use with a view to total communication with his environment. The processes of integration and of learning will thereby be reactivated and will allow the subject to benefit from all his potentialities. Always under the Electronic Ear, we then propose to the individual words rich in high frequencies (sibilants), filtered progressively from 500 to 500 Hz up to 7 or 8000 Hz, that is to say up to the moment when he rediscovers the acoustic relation he had previously engrammed. These sessions are alternated with sessions of filtered music and of Gregorian chant. They bring into play the audio-vocal circuits controlled by the right ear, that is to say borrowing the shortest itinerary in matters of neuronic impulse.

Here is the moment to conclude. What shall we be able to retain from this long exposition centred upon scientific data that sometimes seem far removed from music itself in its creative power? May I be forgiven this somewhat forbidding and all too specialised approach, but let it be granted me, in closing, to address myself to the musician by broaching with him the notion of his responsibility.

Capable of resonating to the accents of a mysterious induction, he must, through the choice of the compositions he realises, through the way in which he uses his art, through the subtlety with which he prepares his modulations, be able to communicate intimately with the one who finds himself at the other end of the chain and whose whole body remains listening to this vibrant message. His gift of creativity is offered to him so that he may place at the service of the other this manna so generously dispensed to him. He must take cognisance of the essential role he is called upon to play with regard to each human being, in order to lead him toward his linguistic reality. Music, indeed, constitutes the best means of preparing the ways upon which language will become established.

It is, in its essence, that first vibration which sets into resonance the human nervous system, the substrate of all the mechanisms called upon to activate the body and the soul. Through its modulations, it can help to fashion the human being in his physical, mental, and spiritual components. Through its accents, it can free from his entanglements the one who finds himself ensnared in the nets that existence will have woven. It is the very foundation of the song that chants the liberation of the being in the grip of the anguish of living. It is a gratuitous gift, strangely and marvellously offered, so that man may rise to his true human condition.

Music thus holds a universal character, placed at the service of all. And the musician must constantly keep in mind that he does not compose, or does not play, music for himself alone, nor essentially to please a circle of initiates, a sort of privileged assembly gathered around one and the same culture. He is there to dispense to all this musical gift he has so generously received, beyond even the human dimensions.

This shows how great is his responsibility, how extended are his powers. And nothing must allow him to use them abusively and to create, in all freedom, sonic assemblies that transgress the laws of harmony, those which govern the march of the world and constitute the very basis of the neuro-physiological responses of every human being. Through his action, through his vigilance, through his struggles and his combats, he must remain attentive to those laws whose universality remains the structuring neurological criterion par excellence. I am of course alluding to those aberrant compositions which are veritable sonic drugs destined to enslave generations of the young by destroying their nervous system, in a manner sometimes definitive.

The appeal I launch to the musicians of our time in evoking the power and the dangers of creative emission must not cause us to forget the one that must be addressed to the specialists charged with ensuring the quality of reception of the musical message at the level of the nervous system destined to perceive it. Just as it serves no purpose to present canvases of the masters to children deprived of vision, or not desirous of seeing, and still less of looking, so it is useless to flood the ears of children with a music whose every beauty one knows and whose unfathomable richness one appreciates, if these presumed young listeners are devoid of a true listening.

It is within our power at the present time, I recall, not only to measure the potentialities of listening but also to modify them in order to increase their efficacy. So much so that it is possible, before tuning the instruments at the very moment one prepares to play them, to tune our ears in order to benefit, beyond the desire to hear once restored, from the faculty of integrating, of imbuing oneself with this message to the point of incarnating it.

Have I sufficiently insisted upon the necessity of knowing and of measuring the effects of music upon the human organism, in order better to grasp the bearing that any musical composition may have, whether one places oneself from an educative and cultural point of view, or whether one addresses oneself to therapeutic criteria.

It would be agreeable to me to end this lecture by expressing a wish: that of seeing constituted, within the ISME, research groups destined to study in depth the problems inherent in the orientations of a psychological and psychoanalytical order taken by certain specialists open to fundamental investigations in matters of neurology and neurophysiology. These teams, working in collaboration with those whose concern remains and must remain that of creating and producing music, will thus allow there to be gathered, in that enormous human reservoir that is the world of today, the energies necessary for the setting-into-place of vast educative and therapeutic means, reserved up to now for a few elites scarcely conscious of what they possess.

I would like, finally, to add a few words that would wish to be musical notes: may the organisers of this congress find here our warm compliments for the enormous effort they have shown in order to bring to a successful conclusion a gathering so dense and so enriching. May it be permitted me to manifest publicly my gratitude to Madame Blanche Leduc, president of the French Section of the ISME, for her immense work, discreetly assumed to the point of self-effacement. It is to her that I owe the honour of being today among you.

Thank you for your attention.

Alfred A. Tomatis

Document digitized by Christophe Besson, 4 June 2010.

Diagrams from the lecture of Doctor Alfred A. Tomatis

ISME – London – August 1978

We have thought it useful to append to the lecture a few diagrams that will allow a better understanding of the different parts of the text:

[Fig. 1 — The human ear]

[Fig. 2 — The external ear]

[Fig. 3 — The middle ear]

[Fig. 4 — The inner ear]

[Fig. 5 — The directing ear]

[Fig. 6 — The ethnic ear: 1) pass-band and slope; 2) latency time]

[Fig. 7 — Vestibular or somatic integrator]

[Fig. 8 — Visual integrator]

[Fig. 9 — Cochlear integrator]

Classical theory = 3 parts A: External ear B: Middle ear (a. hammer, b. anvil, c. stirrup) C: Inner ear

Tomatis theory = 2 parts A: External block B: Internal block

Source: Alfred A. Tomatis, “Music and Its Neuro-Psycho-Physiological Effects,” 13th Congress of the ISME (International Society for Music Education), London (Canada), August 1978. Transcription from the facsimile.