The Tomatis Method was conceived almost 50 years ago by Alfred Tomatis, a French ENT doctor and, in addition, the son of a great opera singer.

At the end of the 1940s, Tomatis was working for the aeronautics industry, in the construction yards. It was while working in occupational medicine that he came to make the discoveries which henceforth bear his name, and which concern the relations that exist between hearing and phonation.

In examining workmen affected by occupational deafness following long periods of exposure to noisy machines, Tomatis observed that the alterations to the ear were always accompanied by a vocal deficiency. He then wondered if these workmen’s defective hearing was not the cause of the alteration to the voice. It happened that, at the same time, his father started to send him singers suffering from vocal problems. Indeed, knowing that he treated ear and voice as an ENT specialist, and also that he had was familiar with the repertoire, he thought that his son would provide immediate solutions to the problems of his singer colleagues.

So, one day, two great singers, who both had problems of vocal control, came to see Tomatis in quick succession. Each time they began singing into the higher range, when they reached a certain note, always the same one, a phenomenon of compression occurred which made them sing more and more out of tune. In fact, beyond this note they always produced the same note, they peaked.

As Tomatis did not really know how to help the singers, he tested heir listening via an audiogram. He then noticed that the two auditory curves presented a deficiency at the same frequential level (4000 Hz). It happened that this auditory profile was the same as the one he had often observed among the workmen working with noisy machinery. Tomatis then wondered if the two singers had in fact, damaged their ears with their own voices.

To verify this hypothesis, he decided to examine a large number of singers (and musicians) and systematically found the same type of auditory profile. At that moment he came to the conclusion that effectively, a subject only reproduces vocally what he is capable of hearing, or more exactly, the voice only emits the harmonics which the ear is capable of hearing.

Since the voice relates the way in which the ear functions, the idea was to find a technical means that would allow to impose a quality auditory perception on subjects presenting vocal deficits.

With this purpose in mind, Tomatis established the listening characteristics of the great singers he could not examine directly, thanks to the recordings of their voices on record, and he took a particular interest in the greatest of them all: Caruso.

He took many snapshots (photos of the frequential composition) of Caruso’s voice.

He also had the opportunity of directly examining and doing the audiogram of Beniamino Gigli, who, along with Caruso, was one of the greatest singers of the time, and to compare this audiogram with the snapshots of his voice. As a result he was able to confirm his hypothesis of a control of the voice by the ear, in other words the existence of an audio-vocal circuit.

So, knowing the characteristics of Caruso’s voice, he sought to provide his subjects whose auto-control was damaged with “Carusian” listening. The singer experiencing problems wore a set of headphones, he spoke into a microphone and heard his own voice in return, modified by a filter system adjusted to the characteristics of Caruso’s voice. While using this device, all began to sing perfectly, with a great feeling of euphoria and well­being. The problem was that once they removed the headphones, the audio-vocal deficiencies reappeared. Tomatis then sought to find a means of making this momentary improvement permanent. It was in 1954, with the invention of electronic gating that he was able to create an apparatus (baptized the “Electronic Ear”) whose purpose was to permanently condition a subject to hear in a determined way, through audio-vocal reaction.