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Tomatis, Autism and Sensory Integration

.......Tomatis Topics

A t that time oiling the vocal cords (larynx) was the common practice of treatment. It was felt that the vocal cords needed greasing much like an automobile engine. Another treatment was strychnine. Tomatis also talks of using male hormones (steroids?). Singer complained of choking on stage during the middle of his performance.

Frustrated that his treatments weren't working, Tomatis put his singers through the same audiometric tests that he put his factory workers through. These tests that had no apparent connection to their problem were very revealing.

Hearing Loss in Opera Singers

He observed that the Opera Singers showed the same patterns of hearing loss as those suffering from occupational deafness. He questioned if these singer could be damaging their hearing by their singing. This went against popular theory, which held that Opera Singer didn't sing loud enough to cause damage. It was felt that singers never went above 80 decibels. Yet Tomatis noted a positive correlation between the numbers of years a person had been singing and the amount of damage to his ears. Tomatis found that a good singer was reaching 80-90 decibels when singing at half strength and reaches 150 decibels inside his own head when singing at full strength. A jet engine is 130 decibels and though a singers voice is not of the same energy as a jet engine the intensity of the sound is the same. Opera singers sing at such loud internal decibel levels that they were destroying their own hearing. The noise exposure of the factory worker was having a similar effect.

The Relationship between Audition and Phonation

"The voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear"

So he had found that these singers were suffering from a hearing loss but he still couldn't explain why they didn't sing on key. While working with the singers who clearly had damage to the larynx (laryngeal dystonia) at the same time in his examination of singers he found a group of successful singers with damaged larynx. Tomatis was becoming increasingly more convinced that the problems were not with the voice. The singers would report that they could hear themselves sing the wrong note but they could no-longer control it. Tomatis speculated that since a singer is his first listener, (bone conduction travels faster), then the poor quality of their self-listening was responsible for everything. In other words the problem is not in the larynx but rather in the ear.

A nother misconception of the day was the voice was related to the size of the larynx. For example, this was the conventional wisdom: Bass Voice - Largest size larynx Baritone - Medium size larynx Tenor - Smallest size larynx

They considered the voice to be like a pipe organ, the larger the pipe the deeper the tone. It was so plausible that no one seriously took the trouble to verify the facts until Tomatis. What he found - No significant relationship between the vocal pitch and the size of the larynx. On the other hand he did notice a connection between vocal pitch and certain auditory qualities. Again there were misconceptions about the vocal pitch of the singers. Common sense had it that the Bass Voice - sang the lowest tones Baritone Voice - sang mid-frequencies Tenor Voice - sang the higher frequencies Yet the facts were that they all sing in the same Octave Range

Tenor Voice - 800-4000 Hertz Baritone Voice - Sings in this same range but adds lower notes Base Voice - Again sings in this range but adds even lower notes.

W hen Tomatis compared the Spectrograms and Audiograms of the Singers he found the The most widely open ears (perceived the most frequencies) belonged to the Bass, Moderately open ears belonged to the Baritone, and The most closed belonged to the Tenor.

Once more the ear appeared to Tomatis as the fundamental instrument of utterance. He was able to verify this experimentally in comparing the scotoma's (dips that indicated a loss) on the listening tests as they always corresponded with a loss in the range of frequencies that the singer could utter. This lead to Tomatis formulating the proposition, which was destined to be the starting point of all his subsequent discoveries that

"The voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear"

Or "One sings or speaks with one's ear" - 1947

"The larynx only emits those harmonics which the ear can perceive"

He was awarded this under the prompting of Raoul Husson who duplicated his findings in the laboratory.