Alfred Tomatis was an ENT physician who devoted his life to the study of the close interaction between the voice, the brain and the ear. His work has had a profound influence on our belief about how a person communicates with themselves and others.
A pioneer in the field of cognitive science, Alfred Tomatis left an indelible mark both with his discoveries and his extraordinary personality. Today we realize the magnitude of the legacy he left considering recent research on brain plasticity. In 2016, the renowned neurologist Norman Doidge paid tribute to him in his latest book “How the Brain Heals Itself”.
Creating the method
Alfred Tomatis worked as an assistant in a hospital in Bichat in Paris, and then in the town of
Bretonneau. The young doctor was confronted with the horrors of war after the bombing of Paris in 1943. After the war, Alfred became a supervisor in the acoustic laboratories of the aeronautical industry, testing the hearing of workers who came into daily contact with the loud sounds of aircraft engines and often suffered from deafness due to their work. When examining these workers, he observed that the lesions that occurred in their ears were always accompanied by vocal deficienc
During the same period, he advised and treated singers who had vocal problems. By testing the singers and creating an acoustic graph, he observed that they too exhibited exactly the same audiometric profile as the workers in the aerospace industry workshops. Like the workers, the singers had variations in their voices because they had variations in their hearing. He therefore pointed out the existence of an auditory- vocal circuit and summarized his conclusions in the following Tomatis law : “The voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear”.
Alfred Tomatis observed a fundamental difference between hearing and listening: Hearing is the passive reception of sounds, while listening is the reception of sensory information to make it understood. He invented a device capable of restoring hearing through a sound system called the “Electronic Ear”.
In 1957, he submitted the “laws” to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. These laws were:
▪ The voice reproduces only what the ear can hear
▪ If we modify the hearing, then the voice is also modified
▪ It is possible to change the voice with continuous and regularly repeated auditory stimulation over a period (law of the residual property).
In 1958, the first Electronic Ear was presented at the World Fair in Brussels and won the Gold Medal for scientific research.
Alfred was the father of five children. One of his children, Christian, studied psychology and joined the family business for many years. During these years, Christian helped his father and participated in his father’s research work.
Alfred Tomatis continued to conduct research and collaborated with several universities in South Africa and Canada, and during this period, he observed that the ear plays an important role in posture, balance and muscle tone. He also developed the hypothesis about acoustic lateralization and the role of the dominant ear. Finally, he was one of the first scientists to discover and point out that the fetus hears from the eighteenth week of gestation and that the ear plays an important role in cognitive development. He went on to find that intrauterine hearing is critical to the infant’s emotional development. The scientific connections he made between otolaryngology and psychology led him to create a new discipline called acoustic-psych phonology.