The encounter with Alfred Tomatis
The authors' recollection, in Neuchâtel
Excerpt from the chapter “Our Experience” of the book TOMATIS — Une expérience à partager (TOMATIS — An Experience to Share, by Juan Antonio Timor Pineda and Chaime Marcuello Servós), reproduced by permission of the authors.
The authors recount their discovery of the method at a congress on language learning, at the University of Neuchâtel, in 1994. A lecture devoted to the integration of languages according to Alfred Tomatis’s method was, they say, a veritable electric shock: in the space of an hour there opened before them a world whose existence they had not suspected — frequency bands, envelope curves, the auditory latency proper to each language. Language teachers for years, they had never heard of it.
The following year, an international Tomatis congress was held in Neuchâtel, and it was there that they met Dr Tomatis in person. They retain the memory of a man of singular presence, entirely inhabited by his work. From that encounter was born a lasting commitment: the full training in the method, and then the profession of practitioner.