Sound therapy – the Tomatis Method

“Mozart,” I thought, and with the word conjured up the most beloved and the most exalted picture that my inner life contained.

In May this year, immediately after his three month stay in hospital, Chris began the Tomatis Method, an auditory training method developed by a Frenchman, Dr. Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001), who theorized that voice and behavior problems are hearing problems. According to him, the voice only reproduces what the ear can hear.

The human ear, which resembles in shape a fetus, begins to develop a few days after conception and is fully formed by the fourth month of pregnancy. The ear doesn’t sleep. It is the only one of our sensory organs that is alert twenty-four hours a day. Tomatis theorized that the problems of autism, schizophrenia and other disorders stem from the fetus not fully hearing the mother’s voice. If a child is not integrated properly into the early environment, he or she will begin to listen more to certain frequencies than to others, will lose the desire to communicate and will turn inward by listening to her/himself. If you change the way the ear hears, he reasoned, language and behavior change, too.

Each of us has a unique auditory curve, which responds to certain sound frequencies and not to others. To achieve optimal hearing (and therefore understanding) Tomatis invented the electronic ear, a device that filters out certain sound frequencies using the music of Mozart and Gregorian chants. Why Mozart? According to Tomatis, among other things, the music of Mozart encompasses childhood auditory frequencies of 120 beats per minute. The electronic ear filters the music of Mozart to represent the sound environment before birth.
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Hesse, Hermann, Steppenwolf, Bantam Books, 1974, pg. 233

6 thoughts on “Sound therapy – the Tomatis Method”

  1. There are Tomatis centers in most larger cities and their suburbs. Google the name and you should have plenty to go on. I did a quick check of your blog and see that there may be other therapies that I have also used for my son with excellent results. After Tomatis, my son undertook a different kind of sound therapy that induced out-of-body experiences. In the past several months there have been some interesting articles appearing in newspapers about treating mental illness using different kinds of sound therapies and even LSD. I had to test drive therapies that I thought could be beneficial, because there is almost no information on what works for schizophrenia. I’ll send you what I found.

  2. Here are some links to therapies that look promising, and are often based on vibrations and light. I believe that out-of-body experiences help a person get a better grip on “self.”

    http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com/2011/11/light-perennial-healer.html

    http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com/2011/11/benefits-of-out-of-body-experiences.html
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html?hp
    http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com/2010/05/sound.html

    Some of these therapies are only being conducted at universities, and in the case of the lucid light stimulator you would have to write to the inventors or google it to find out which therapists in the States are using it. There is another very inexpensive therapy that works wonders and that is to practice low expressed emotion. You can put these words into my search bar and read our experience with this. I finally realized that my being worried only made my son worry. I stopped crying about him, and feeling sorry for him. I decided he was not mentally ill, and he is proving me right. Good luck with your research!

  3. sound therapy is definitely a science which has evolved since thousands of years. And listening to the healing sounds can definitely help a person overcome his illnesses which is specifically designed for that ailment and the troubled frequencies of the sick organ.

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