For millennia, people have used music to raise energy and to alter mood. Books, poetry, films and plays, academic studies, and concert programs extol the benefits of listening to music, of singing, and of playing musical instruments. A hundred years ago, a quasi-religious belief in the power of music to heal mental illness drew performers into mental hospitals to help the patients. No one understood how music causes the changes claimed for it.
In the mid-1950s, the French otolaryngologist, Alfred Tomatis, allowed his admiring colleagues[i] to prove to the French Academy of Medicine and the French Academy of Sciences his discovery that the right ear controls the pitch of the voice. He became interested in how the treatments he had devised for curing singers who had lost their pitch might be applied to speaking difficulties, such as in dyslexic syndrome, stuttering, and autism. A less satisfied colleague broke away from his collaboration with Tomatis over the latter’s attachment to Freudian psychiatric theory, took his otolaryngology specialty, and set up practice. When Guy Bérard had 8,000 patient profiles he analyzed his audiograms and other records and published Hearing Equals Behavior.
I had read neither author when I made my observations and astonishing discoveries while healing our son Daniel of schizophrenia using Focused Listening music therapy. When I wrote my book, I saw that my independent study of neurology from standard texts did not adequately explain my discoveries. By then, English translations of some Tomatis titles were available and I was able to draw on Tomatis’s specialized understanding of the neurology of ear-driven vocal pitch in The Ear and the Voice to correct my neurological explanation for right-ear-driven left-brain dominance. Tomatis did not understand cerebral integration. My work in some ways corrects and expands on his knowledge. When I came to Bérard after Listening for the Light was published, I found further confirmations for aspects of my work in his discoveries. Again, my work in some ways corrects and expands on Bérard’s knowledge.
The treatments offered by those specialists were binaural and typically delivered in two-week programs of daily two-hour or one-hour sessions, sometimes divided into morning and afternoon treatments. I followed the Tomatis Method exposure times Daniel and I had experienced, which were an hour-and-a-half of Mozart violin concertos (not filtered in my application) followed by a half-hour of unfiltered Gregorian chant. Just as the Focused Listening technique Daniel used at home offers particular advantages to people with weak or no left-brain dominance, Focused Listening with the left ear followed by binaural listening may be preferable for people suffering from depression. At present, we have little comparative data except the fact that Focused Listening cures the most severe form of mental illness, schizophrenia, a condition that neither Tomatis nor Bérard could cure. In fact, Bérard warns against using his AIT method for schizophrenia, a stance my discoveries with a monaural technique strongly affirm.
[i] Presented in 1957 to the French Academy of Medicine by Dr. Moulonguet and Raoul Husson; presented to the Academy of Sciences by Prof. Monnier. “The larynx only emits those harmonics which the ear can perceive.” Alfred Tomatis, The Conscious Ear: My Life of Transformation through Listening (Barrytown, NY, and Phoenix: Station Hill Press and Sound Listening and Learning Centre, 1990), 66.
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