The Passion of Alfred Tomatis (interview, 1989)

Theorist and therapist of listening, lover of the operatic art and animator of the “Centre du Langage”, this gentle giant known the world over develops in two books — L’oreille et la vie and L’oreille et la voix — theories that answer many questions about the evolution of our language and its universality. Today we open a series of conversations in which humour and knowledge share a single ticket for another voyage: that of cosmic man, whose ears will be built through contact with information.

Blinis: Sound messages are taking on ever greater importance in our daily lives. Sometimes they reinforce visual signals, sometimes they replace them. Are we on the threshold of a mutation of signs?

Alfred Tomatis: I believe we have reached the summit of what we could draw from sight, and that a new era is beginning in which the ear will find its rightful place. For two thousand years we have lived in an essentially visual culture. This primacy of the eye has been challenged by many, but with unequal success. One of the first was no doubt Socrates — with the outcome that everyone knows. Hebrew culture, on the other hand, ceaselessly calls upon listening. If the word listen is repeated some five thousand times in the Scriptures, that is not a fact devoid of meaning.

Today we are not witnessing a mutation, but simply a natural adherence to the “what for” man was created. For he is not a sleeping animal, as Plato would have it, but an animal that listens. He is a “nothing” that listens. What there is to listen to is another matter. The difficulty of understanding listening in relation to the rest comes from the fact that man has been cut into thin slices, distinguishing within him the skeletal system, the sensory system with the eye and the ear, and so on. We forgot to add what we did in order to understand how all of this works.

The further I advance in my work, the more I believe that man is wholly an ear, and that the rest is added to him. When we see how the ear is formed, we shall understand how it preceded the brain and how it is, in a sense, its precursor.

Blinis: What precise role, in your view, does the ear play in this context?

Alfred Tomatis: One must know that the first function of the ear is to send a great quantity of stimuli to the cerebral cortex. Thanks to them, it becomes active and thought is set in motion. We now know that man deprived of listening quickly sinks into a world of alienation. Another function of the ear is to enter into relation with the environment that surrounds us. It is the ear that directs all impulses towards the muscles, that gives the dynamic of verticality, of motor function and of the mutual reactions of the limbs. Not a single muscle of the body escapes this phenomenon: when we write, we do so with the ear; when we read, the muscles of the eye depend on the ear.

In the Bible it is written countless times “listen, and you will see”; indeed, whoever does not have the good fortune of an open ear sees nothing. Even if he could see an object, it would, in his mutilated universe, have value only if it could be named and if it were possible to convey it to another. Each person belongs to the human “corpus”; man does not exist in isolation, but within a group — and the group exists only if it can name itself and communicate. At the summit of the human pyramid stands the ear with its accessories, and among them the skin, which is part of the ear.

I believe there is an ever stronger need for communication. If everyone seems so eager to speak of communication, it is quite simply because it is lacking. Man’s great aspiration is to become what he is deep down: an ear. The time has come to ask the essential questions about the use of this organ, for we risk using it in a way that only blocks it. The mission of every well-emitted sound signal is to be at once information and a charge of energy. The more stimuli the brain receives, the better it works. If relatively complex sound signals are emitted for simple messages, if synthetic voices are placed in cars and lifts, the energy of these signals must be perfectly calculated, for one of the characteristics of the ear is its difficulty in adapting to certain messages. If they are bad, the ear will become distorted — and may even risk rupturing. The further we advance in the field of communication, the more precautions we shall have to take so as not to damage or destroy it. It is a dangerous game that we are now entering.

Blinis: All the more dangerous in that we do not all possess the same codes; it seems that each society has a particular system — or at least characteristic signals.

Alfred Tomatis: Exactly. Every corner of the world has the good fortune to possess its own ethnic independence, linked to the impedances of the place — that is, to the resistances offered to the propagation of sound in that location. Here lies the source of “Babelism”, and this is what causes a message produced in one place to be transformed in another. It is not only the larynx and the mouth that emit it, and the ear that listens to it; one must take into account the air — that hyphen, that vector of variable properties which modulates information.

Those who build high-fidelity equipment in a given country, according to local standards, do not obtain exactly the same auditory sensations elsewhere. For example, I often travel to Canada and take my musical equipment with me; now I have noticed that, in order to listen to the same record, I must change the settings of the tone equalizer to recover the intelligibility and balance to which I am accustomed. I must adapt the form of the musical message to the place of listening and to the impedance of the air.

Interview with Alfred Tomatis published in the magazine Blinis, March 1989. Spanish version at altom.es.