The electronic ear
Listen
to French properly and speak it easily
a
programm with the electronic ear
Further
information and pricing detail:
ask for a personalized
programm
Learning a foreign language is not a question of having a gift for languages but rather a problem of hearing: open the ear and it becomes evident that
"we
are all born naturally multi-lingual".
In
1957 Professor Alfred Tomatis laid out
to the French Academy of Sciences the laws he had discovered
correlating hearing and speaking which improved also the learning of foreign
languages.
The
first law for hearing is: The voice contains only
what the ear hears.
This first law highlights the relation between languages: If all languages use the same base tones (125 to 250 Hertz), the overtones are very different from one language to another. For example English uses a lot of high tones ranging from 2,000 to 12,000 Hertz. Conversely French uses above all tones with a maximum of 2000 Hertz. A. Tomatis explained that by the fact that every nationality creates different tones using mouth cavity and the tongue in another way. So we can speak of our "mother tongue". You position your tongue in your mouth differently when speaking a foreign language.
This first law highlights the relation between languages: If all languages use the same base tones (125 to 250 Hertz), the overtones are very different from one language to another. For example English uses a lot of high tones ranging from 2,000 to 12,000 Hertz. Conversely French uses above all tones with a maximum of 2000 Hertz. A. Tomatis explained that by the fact that every nationality creates different tones using mouth cavity and the tongue in another way. So we can speak of our "mother tongue". You position your tongue in your mouth differently when speaking a foreign language.
Our
ears, by constantly listening to those around us and to ourselves, are
most attuned to the frequencies of our native tongue. For the foreign
frequencies, we are, so to speak, deaf. And
here comes the connection with the discovery of Pr. Tomatis: because we
cannot hear foreign tones, we cannot pronounce them correctly.
What is worse, we can not memorize them easily.
An
almost hopeless situation, until Professor Tomatis found a way to train
your ears to hear different tones. By having your ears trained first,
you can reduce significantly the time required to learn a new language.
Once your ears have been trained, you will be able to hear the new language
correctly. Therefore, you will be able to memorize the words quickly and
pronounce them well. In the next section we will explain how we can train
your ears.
An
analogy might help explain how your ears can be trained. But before that,
you have to know why the ear cannot hear certain tones. It is because
the two tiny muscles of the middle ear, the muscle of the hammer and the
muscle of the stirrup, are not prepared to focus on sounds rarely used
in our mother tongue. They need to be exercised to do so.
Pr.
Tomatis came up with an ingenious way to do just that. Oversimplified
it can be explained as follows: You are made to listen to a tone, or frequency,
that you cannot hear well. This tone is continuously switched on and off.
The muscles of the middle ear are so forced to stretch and relax. This
strengthens these muscles and enables your ear, after several sessions,
to perceive the tone better. However, the movements are so gentle that
you will not have sore muscles. Nor will the training wear you out. In
fact, it may revitalize you because of the mastering of high frequencies.
The
auditive stimulation is provided by the electronic ear
in order to satisfy the second law of hearing: if
one gives the imperfect ear the chance of hearing correctly, the voice
instantly and unconsciously improves.
Music:
mainly the music of Mozart which is so rich in harmonics and which encourages
joy and happiness and therefore energy.
French
language: filtered sounds and reading sessions where the participant's
voice is automatically corrected by the electronic ear.
About
all the frequencies left on the tape are those you have to learn. This
modified recording is then entered into an electronic device that was
developed by Professor Tomatis. It continuously switches the sound on
and off. The sound that comes out of the Electronic Ear is fed into headphones,
and adjusted to a comfortable level. It is a strange sound, but not unpleasant.
You will listen to this "music" for about one hour and a half
per session. During that time, you may draw or color, knit, play chess,
or ... sleep.
The
electronic ear allows to satisfy the third law established by A. Tomatis
: it is possible to transform the voice through
auditive stimulation over a certain period of time. The recovery
of the largest frequencies is the first aim during the hearing sessions.
What's more the languages not only differ in the frequencies they use,
they also differ in the length of the syllables.
Pronouncing
them within the right time frame is the second most important factor in
speaking a foreign language well. On average it takes 75 milliseconds
to pronounce an American syllable, much longer than the emission time
of a French syllable (50 milliseconds). If you want to learn French, for
instance, you will have to learn to pronounce the syllables more quickly.
According to A. Tomatis that means that your ears have to react more rapidly.
This can be achieved by retraining the ear. So, you will learn the length
of the syllables at the same time as the foreign frequencies.
There
is more to languages than words alone. We also need to learn the order
in which to put the words which words to stress, with which rhythm to
speak, etc. That is called the structure of the language. Professor Tomatis
also developed a method to learn the structure of the language more easily.
A
few paragraphs earlier, we talked about the phrase "mother tongue",
stressing the importance of the word "tongue". Now let's look
at the word "mother" in "mother tongue". It has been
known for quite some time that the very structure of our "mother
tongue" was ingrained in us while growing in our mother's womb. During
the last five months of her pregnancy, we were able to hear the voice
of our mother. Her voice sounded, however, quite different from her real
one. Her voice had to pass through the amniotic fluid around the fetus,
and this acted as a sound filter. It lets only the high pitch sounds,
the ones above 8,000 Hertz, through. The constant exposure to these high
pitch sounds ingrained in us the very structure of our "mother tongue".
Likewise,
through the Tomatis method, we can simulate this process. All you have
to do is to listen to a text, spoken in the foreign language, and filtered
through an 8000 Hertz filter. That imitates what you would have heard
in the womb. After several sessions, we will gradually add lower pitch
tones to simulate the "birth" into the new language.
Once
born into the new language, you will begin to speak it. You will start
by repeating words, after a model. Later, you will repeat full sentences
and learn to control your pronunciation and intonation. How to control
your voice most effectively is the subject of the next section.
We
are all aware that some people are right handed, while others are left
handed. But not many know that we also have a dominant ear. Some hear
mostly with their right ear, whereas others listen mostly with their left
ear. Professor Tomatis discovered that it is most advantageous to listen
predominantly with your right ear, especially when you want to learn a
language. That is because your right ear is directly connected with your
left brain, the center for language abilities. If you listen with your
left ear, the information is fed into the right brain and has to be rerouted
to the left brain before it can be processed. That takes time. In addition,
by this route, the sound gets deformed slightly, especially the high pitch
tones. It would thus be a major advantage if we all could become "right
hearing".
The
good news is that it is possible to retrain your right ear to become the
dominant one. It goes as follows. As the program proceeds, the sounds
are fed more and more into your right ear. As you practice vocal exercises,
your voice is fed back to your right ear to create a feedback loop that
teaches you to control your voice. Little by little, you will start to
listen more with your right ear.