Ten-year-old Brigid cringes and grins from beneath her earphones
as if she can't decide which it is she wants to express. "Those
high pitches!" she exclaims. Otherwise she sits contentedly
tying knots into a ball of yarn. From beneath my earphones, I try
to listen to her teach me how to tie yarn knots but my head feels
more stretched and pulled than the yarn. She smiles triumphantly
as her fingers wrap themselves dexterously around the threads while
mine trip with unfamiliarity. I may be running a mental marathon
but my fingers sure can't do the walking.
Our skulls, in the meantime, are aligned to headset sensors that
send filtered Benedictine chants to our brains through our bones.
Dr. Andrew Franck, who trained in Europe in holistic health modalities
and Tomatis Sound therapy, comes in to check on us. "Has the
program switched to the Mozart?" he asks Karen Moller, his
expert knitter and sound therapy assistant.
She nods. We are swimming in flutes and violins and distortions.
Brigid has moved on to Intermediate Cat's Cradle. She's good at
this.
Sound Therapy is a unique modality of treatment that improves listening
skills, increases attention and concentration, increases learning
ability, and decreases hyperactivity and hypersensitivity to sound.
In Europe it is part of the standard adjunct care of Attention Deficit
Disorder and dyslexia. The therapy has been rigorously tested with
published results in peer-reviewed journals. Here in the States,
however, it is little known outside specialists' circles. Developed
by the French physician Alfred Tomatis, who passed away in January
this year at the age of 82, Sound Therapy is the use of filtered
music and sound through a machine-the Electronic Ear-that retrains
the ear and the brain.
Dr. Franck, the mastermind behind the Healing Center in Woodstock,
combines his approach with over 20 years' immersion in Steiner philosophy,
Waldorf education, and Tomatis' Sound therapy. After Franck heard
of Tomatis' work several years ago, he found it intriguing enough
to study Sound Therapy at the Tomatis London Center. He later traveled
to Paris to study directly with Tomatis himself. "Tomatis and
his wife were very kind to me. He took me into his confidence, like
we'd known each other for 25 years. We talked about cases, Lena
would bring out the scotch, and we'd have a ball," recalls
Franck.
Alfred Tomatis was born in Nice, France, in1920. Trained in Paris
as an ear, nose, and throat specialist, he gained early fame by
studying occupational noise during World War II with hearing-damaged
soldiers. "There were a great many soldiers who experienced
hearing loss," explains Dr. Franck. "Tomatis was called
in to treat them. Through testing, he recognized the seeming contradiction
that many of them had a full range of hearing but also that in fact,
they couldn't hear. They had some sort of block.
"Because of their disability, these soldiers were on some sort
of government pension," Franck recounts. "Interestingly,
in the beginning, most of them were quite unwilling to comply with
Tomatis' tests. When Tomatis removed the psychological threat to
their pensions, they heard better. He discovered that our hearing
range often depends on our psychological state. Psychological barriers
to hearing are real."
In this and other ways, Tomatis' findings refute the classic Helmholtz
model that illustrates hearing as the passage of a vibration into
a single conduit to the brain, where it is then processed.
The Tomatis model, however, proposes that "the total structure
of the ear is like an instrument that is constantly tuning itself
to pick up information," says Franck. It is related to our
physical, emotional, and neural states of being. "In fact,
we hear differently according to our individuality," says Franck.
Three Laws of Hearing
After his stint with the World War II soldiers, Tomatis went on
to make landmark experiments in audiology. In one of these, he blocked
a singer's ears, letting through only certain frequencies. Almost
immediately, the singer's voice deteriorated in such a way that
the frequencies blocked from the ears disappeared from the singer's
voice. Based on this observation, Tomatis postulated his first and
second laws of hearing. First, that when the ears cannot hear certain
frequencies, the voice cannot emulate them either. And second, if
hearing is modified, the voice changes immediately.
Tomatis' father, himself a famous opera singer, encouraged his son
to work with opera singers, who not infrequently develop "professional
deafness" and as a result lose their voices as well. "The
vocal amplitude of their own voices is so loud that they damage
their own audio-nerve structures," explains Franck. Tomatis
found that they were not actually going deaf, however.
Rather, he theorized that constant exposure to loud noise rendered
the muscles in the middle ear "flabby", from overload
of loud sound to the inner ear. Tomatis reasoned that the singers'
hearing, and therefore their voices, could be restored by retraining
the muscles of the inner ear.
Think about this for a minute. It's the late1940s and you are considering
training the two very small muscles of the inner ear. How are you
going to do that? They cannot lift weights. Unlike eye muscles,
they cannot move at will. After extensive experimentation, Tomatis
discovered that these two muscles could be passively strengthened
by having them listen to "music" that is alternately switched
on and off. The ear muscles follow by stretching and relaxing, and
in this way become toned.
Tomatis' prototype sound machine was like an old-fashioned sewing
machine that he switched on and off. He later found that progress
could be expedited by switching low and high frequencies between
the two ear canals through a process called "gating".
Gating is a function of Tomatis' Electronic Ear, the invention for
which he became most widely known. He also became famous for his
ear retraining work with singers and actors, some of whom included
Maria Callas, Beniamino Gigli, Sting, and Gerard Depardieu.
Learning and Listening
Tomatis' bridge to the learning field came as he began exploring
the frequencies of language. Every spoken language, he discovered,
uses a different set of frequencies. This is why it is so difficult
for us to learn foreign languages. French, for example, uses frequencies
mainly between 1,000 and 2,000 Hz. French ears, therefore, are accustomed
mainly to these frequencies. The British, on the other hand, are
accustomed to listen to frequencies between 2,000 and 12,000 Hz,
so they have a hard time hearing French sounds, and vice versa.
Tomatis found that if you train the ear to get accustomed to the
foreign frequencies, you learn the language more easily.
His next foray into the connection between learning and listening
came out of the question of how the left and right ears differ,
and whether it would make any difference with which ear one listens.
Tomatis showed that the ears are far from identical and that right-ear-dominant
people learn much more easily. This is due to the right ear's direct
connection to the language-processing left side of the brain.
The left ear, on the other hand, is connected to the right brain,
where language cannot be processed. The impulse has to travel across
a bridge, the corpus callosum, to the right brain, where it loses
some of the higher frequencies along the way. This poses a serious
challenge to left-ear-dominant people. Higher frequencies are necessary
to interpret language, and so errors and delays are introduced into
the left-ear-dominant system. The difference between the sounds
of "b" and "p", for example, differ only in
the higher harmonics, so someone who is left-ear-dominant has to
guess what is being said from the context. Tomatis' solution was
to teach the ears to become right-ear-dominant to facilitate better
listening. This is also done through the Electronic Ear.
Ultimately, Tomatis decided that listening is key to learning. That
being the case, then hearing all of the frequencies of the auditory
spectrum equally well was essential. Based on thousands of tests,
Tomatis concluded that there is an "ideal listening curve,"
and that those who have it learn more easily than those whose curve
is distorted.
Fetal Sensing-the Roots of Hearing
The listening response is based on two variables-bone conduction
and air conduction. Air conduction is where the sound wave travels
into the outer ear to reach the eardrum and the brain. Bone conduction
is the way we sense through the skeleton and the way a fetus "hears"
when it is in the womb. "In utero, the infant's ear is different
from ours in that it perceives sound through water," Franck
explains. The French medical establishment initially laughed at
Tomatis' research showing that infants pick up sound in a water
medium through the mother's skeletal system. He was later awarded
the French Medal of Honor for it.
"Modalities of how we take in sound are correlated in the cortex
of the brain," Franck continues. "There is a specific
form that is most conducive to learning. Bone conduction is one
of these modalities, and children, even autistic children, often
sense more through bone conduction."
Tomatis discovered this purely by accident. He was conducting research
using the voice of a woman filtered through water. Her young autistic
daughter was present in the laboratory and after hearing the sound
of her mother's filtered voice, she uttered her first sentence in
five years. "It was," Frank says, "a Eureka moment."
By working with filtering and response, Tomatis and his research
team understood that air conduction and bone conduction arrive in
the brain about 20 milliseconds apart. Their two paths make up the
listening curve. To improve a person's listening curve, Tomatis
thought, the weaker parts of the curve could be selectively trained
with filtered, gated music, letting only certain frequencies through.
Accordingly, he introduced special filters into the Electronic Ear,
which not only improved his patients' listening skills but also
their learning abilities.
In the Sound Laboratory
So what is a treatment like? "In a nutshell, a child is evaluated,
and if we think he needs therapy, we usually recommend two months,
in which time we orient the entire listening organization,"
says Franck. "We also make lots of suggestions to foster the
child's progress, such as vocal exercises and home hygienics. Sometimes
we do cranial-sacral work to adjust his rhythms. Everyone's treatment
is individualized."
The testing rooms are simple tables set up with the Electronic Ear
machines, while therapy is given in a bright room laden with toys,
balls of yarn, games, puzzles, and Lego building blocks. As the
child listens to filtered Gregorian chants, Mozart, or mother's
voice, his hands are busy at some dexterous high-motor control skill,
such as knitting and Cat's Cradle.
The purpose of the games is to develop the relationship between
the way aural repatterning works and how the brain changes. "The
brain is willing to change, but it loves to use the body as it does
so," says Franck. "We do more than ear training by bringing
in the peripheral aspects of motion. This reinforces new structuring
ability. We are then literally 'making' our bodies, helping to create
new structural folds in the cerebral cortex of the brain,"
he continues.
Sound Therapy's holistic approach includes dietary modifications,
reducing or modifying the child's exposure to television and video
games, and regulating sleep patterns. This approach was borne out
of discoveries showing that the physical state of the organism also
affects hearing. For example, body pH can determine whether you
are a good listener or not. "High acidity is associated with
being a poor listener," says Dr. Franck. "I have parents
of children with so-called Attention Deficit Disorder who come in
saying their children watch only three to four hours of TV a day.
Only three to four hours! Well, you know when they're sitting in
front of that television, they're hardly breathing, which means
their oxygen levels go down, and the agglutination of erythrocytes
[red blood cells clumping together] goes up. Of course they're going
to be restless and not want to go to sleep when they're done watching
television."
Health Benefits and Energy Boosts
Repatterning the brain leads to more than better learning. Oddly
enough, it also results in marked physical and emotional improvements
such as increased energy levels and better moods. Tomatis said this
is due to the increased stimulation of Corti cells in the brain,
which Franck likens to "feeding the nervous system."
Tomatis tells about this discovery in conjunction with his work
with the Benedictine monks at Solemne, France. The Benedictines
have preserved the Gregorian chant in the most original form it
exists in today, with monks chanting at regular times throughout
the day. "In the 1960s, the administrator of the main abbey
in France had decided to dispense with the chanting," recounts
Franck. "A year later, Tomatis was invited to look into the
inordinately high level of depression existing in the monks of the
monastery. He had some of the monks begin chanting again according
to their former schedule while the rest did not. Those who chanted
felt immediate relief. The remainder of the monks resumed chanting
and the problem was solved."
"Tomatis' studies illustrate that the whole psycho-neuro-immune
system is constantly built up by high frequencies," Franck
continues. This is why sound therapy can be used as adjunct treatment
for chronic fatigue, clinical depression, and anxiety.
Tomatis practiced what he preached in terms of health and well being,
says Franck. "I met Tomatis on his deathbed years ago (he had
a number of so-called deathbeds) and even while he was so sick,
when he had the strength he would get up every other hour to do
some Gregorian chant. "One of Tomatis' goals was that we would
all become musical beings, and that we would all become able to
sing ourselves back to health."
In many Asian countries, mothers-to-be play classical music to
their pre-birth infants to encourage their agreeable natures and intelligence.
Is this practice based on bone conduction? "High pitch sounds
of music filtered through water accentuate a child's ability to be
more awake when he is awake, and to be more asleep when he is asleep,"
says Franck. "High frequency sounds are as important to child
development as crawling. Low tones are not as effective and can, in
fact, be deleterious for the child. The child is a delicate instrument,
sensitive to light and dark, hot and cold, high and low sounds. The
child's acclimation process is in the process of hardening so it can
deal with the world. Lower sounds need larger bodies to take them
in."
Does all classical music produce the same beneficial effect for the
developing fetus? "Tomatis always recommends Mozart," Franck
says. "This was for reasons of harmonic analysis. Especially
the string music is rich in a manifold relationship of sounds that
aren't found in other music. It is full of overtones and those high
overtones have the most effect on the brain. Tomatis did a study comparing
the sleeping patterns of children while playing them the music of
Mozart and Beethoven. The children slept better with Mozart. Tomatis
analyzed the music and found more compressed high frequencies in Mozart's
music. Beethoven's music, we can say, is less resplendent on the high
tone qualities. This is not at all a qualitative judgment on the music,"
he adds.
