The listening ear.

Your work as music teachers and mine as a clinician may be different, but they dovetail in many ways. The children I help have issues with communication, social behavior, attention, language and learning skills--all being related to poor listening. My work consists of using instrumental music and the singing voice as sound stimulation, to train and develop listening. Teaching music goes well beyond initiating children to an art form. The influence of music on the brain and its value on the child's physical, emotional and cognitive development is now well documented. From my perspective, learning to play an instrument and to sing is a highly effective way to teach listening. What you and I have in common is our role in developing the listening ear.

My stance on the importance of listening stems from personal experience. As a youngster, I loved music, but I could not access it. I wanted to play guitar, but I couldn't distinguish the movements of my right from my left hand. I gave up guitar and tried singing in a group, still without success. I sang in tune but couldn't harmonize with the players, couldn't memorize the lyrics and I had no rhythm. This "musical disability" was part of a wider range of difficulties related to dyslexia. At 18, I finally met someone who could help me. Alfred Tomatis found that listening was at the root of my miseries and "prescribed" his listening training therapy ... I later became a "Tomatis specialist."

Listening is the ability to tune in and out at will. This attuning is vital for controlling a musical instrument as well as our voices. The musicians and singers that I help often experience a "gap," "distance," "disconnection" or a "lack of dialogue" between themselves and their instrument or voice. This indicates a listening breakdown. My role as an "ear tuner" is to get listening to work so, in turn, your teaching becomes more effective. Again, our interventions dovetail.

We all know the ear has two functions: sound perception and balance. Balance is just the tip of the iceberg. The vestibular system of the inner ear influences our posture, our movements and the position of our body in space. The interplay between the "ear of the body" and the auditory ear is fundamental for playing an instrument; or for singers, mastering their "body instrument."

Like food and air, sound and all other sensory stimuli "feed" the brain with the energy it needs to operate. High-frequency sounds (harmonics or overtones) in music and voice are more energizing than low-frequency sounds. As a result, openness and clarity in the upper range of the auditory spectrum is necessary for maintaining a high level of attention and focus while learning, practicing and performing.

I could spend days explaining what champagne tastes like, but you won't know until you taste it yourself. The same is true for listening. An "Earobic" exercise featuring a short piece by Mozart gives a "taste" of listening and increases awareness of the role of the ear and body in listening to music, playing and singing. In the first half of the recording, the lower frequencies of the music are progressively filtered out to leave only the higher overtones. During the second half, the frequencies are reintroduced in the reverse order so the music ends as it started, in its full spectrum. Participants were invited to sit in the "listening posture"--straight but with no tension, head slightly tilted forward, knees lower than the pelvis and feet flat on the floor--and instructed to breathe slowly, deeply, with eyes closed.

Typical comments following this exercise included: "feeling taller," "lighter," "energized," "centered" and "peaceful inside." The full spectrum music at the end is perceived as "more ample," with "more texture," "not as flat," "livelier" than the music in the beginning, "as if it had acquired a new dimension." This is the dimension of the musical listening ear.

Time was too short to explore the "ear-voice connection" and its application to singing. Participants were referred to the Earobics CDs: Series I and 2 and the guided exercises to enrich listening and voice as explained in Madaule's book, When Listening Comes Alive.

Paul Madaule, a psychologist, founded The Listening Centre in Toronto. His book, When Listening Comes Alive, tells the story of his personal and professional experience with Dr. A. Tomatis and his listening training method.