Mostly Mozart for Kids

Something To Think On

My own formal introduction to the Mozart Effect began with a meeting in the early 1980’s with the famed Parisian physician, psychologist, and educator Dr. Alfred Tomatis. The son of a musician, Dr. Tomatis became a specialist in hearing disorders, particularly those that affected professional instrumentalists and singers. Early in his career, he defined what came to be known as the Tomatis Effect—that is, the fact that the voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear. Having noticed that a group of French factory workers he was treating for environmentally caused hearing problems also had difficulty with speech, Tomatis soon realized that his opera singers’ voice troubles were also often caused by hearing, or, more accurately, listening, problems. His success in improving his patients’ expression by helping them listen better soon won him a wide following in the educational and musical community.

Dr. Tomatis continued his study of listening and its fascinating relationship to a wide variety of skills—including balance, posture, musicality, attentiveness, language ability and expressiveness. “Likewise because of he ear he is able to express himself, listen and think.” Tomatis’s second breakthrough came when he focused on the proximity of the hearing and emotion centers in the brain, and discovered that hearing disorders are often a reflection of emotional difficulties, and vice versa. To treat one effectively, he concluded it was necessary to treat the other.

Following the trail of inquiry, Tomatis began working with children with psychological and learning disabilities, as well as children and adults with severe head injuries. Treating their disabilities vian their hearing, he learned that different frequencies and rhythms of sound had remarkably different effects on this patients’ state of being. High frequency stimulation tended to reap the best results, increasing energy levels and creating a feeling of calm, whole low-frequency sound often proved disorienting.
A third breakthrough in the 1960’s—the recognition of the highly efficient effects of Mozart’s music in particular—came when Dr. Tomatis combined what head learned about the physical effects of sound with what he had learned from his study of embryology. He knew that the ear is the fetus’s first organ to hook up to the brain’s developing neural systems, and that the fetus begins to hear by the second trimester in the womb. Understanding that the mother’s voice must serve as a kind of alternative umbilical cord for her developing baby, a prime source of environmental nurturing, Tomatis theorized that interference with hearing in utero and in the first years of life could lead to listening, learning and emotional disabilities later on.

This would explain, Tomatis realized, why using high frequencies (such as those heard in the womb and, after birth, from mothers using baby talk) has such a helpful effect on the emotionally and developmentally challenged. With this in mind, he set about experimenting with all kinds of high-frequency sound for his young patients—as he put it, “ all that could be acoustically recorded.” His patients listened on headphones to both noise and music—classical, modern, traditional, and contemporary. He worked with music from Asia, India, and Africa. After all his experiments were completed and all data compiled, it turned out that two sound experiences were far and away the most effective in the children’s treatment: the voice of the child’s mother, filtered to omit all but the high frequencies the child once heard in the womb, and the music of Mozart.