The scientific intuitions and discoveries of Alfred Tomatis, a forerunner of his time who was often misunderstood, have been verified and continue to be verified today, although unfortunately few people recognise him as the pioneer of all these discoveries. We know that each stage of life influences the next. When a blockage occurs during the intra-uterine period, the suffering can persist throughout life. But a person who receives love, who is progressively given autonomy during their development, has a greater chance of becoming a balanced, serene, harmonious adult, confident in themselves, in others and in life.
Foetal development
The scientific community now accepts that the inner ear matures around the fifth month of gestation. Alfred Tomatis was a pioneer in this field, faced with the incomprehension and criticism of the scientific community of his time. But Doctor Tomatis had already demonstrated that the baby perceives sounds before the ear becomes functional: from the embryonic period onwards, it receives sound vibrations through the receptor cells of its skin, its muscles and its joints. When its ear begins to function, it displays, according to the Tomatis model, a selectivity for high frequencies — the low frequencies being attenuated by the tissues and the amniotic fluid, while the high-frequency harmonics of the maternal voice pass through preferentially by bone conduction.
According to Marie-Louise Aucher, a pioneering psychophonist (La Voix sur la Voie, 1983), soprano mothers would give birth to children whose upper body is finely developed, with excellent sensorimotor coordination; mothers with deep voices would have children with a particularly well-developed lower body. This hypothesis, specific to Aucher’s psychophony — a discipline related to but distinct from Audio-Psycho-Phonology —, is not validated by modern neuroscience and does not constitute a central foundation of the Tomatis method. It is cited here as an illustration of the cross-disciplinary reflections of the time on the links between the maternal voice and foetal development.
Music and the foetus’s reactions
Doctor Michelle Clément studied babies’ reactions to different kinds of music: Brahms and Beethoven agitate them; Mozart and Vivaldi soothe them. Babies are very fond of Mozart — especially his early works. Rock drives them wild. Some pregnant women have had to leave a rock concert, forced to do so by the unpleasant kicks their baby gave them in the belly. The conductor Boris Brott recounted that the scores he knew without having studied them were those his mother played in her repertoire when she was pregnant with him. Menuhin expressed in his autobiography (« Unfinished Journey », 1977) similar reflections on the prenatal bond between mother and child through music.
Maternal influences and quantum physics
Various studies emphasise that a mother’s love for her child, the ideas she forms about them, the richness of the communication she establishes with them have a decisive influence on their physical development, on the defining traits of their personality and on their character predispositions. Some researchers have postulated that quantum phenomena could allow biological systems to encode and transmit vibratory information. These hypotheses, formulated outside the framework of classical physics, remain highly speculative. Researchers such as R. Sheldrake have proposed the notion of morphogenetic fields to explain the persistence of specific forms — a speculative hypothesis not accepted by the dominant scientific consensus, but evoked by Tomatis to illustrate the phenomena of prenatal resonance.
Doctor Hugon, head of the neonatology department at the hospital in Metz, France, created the « sound umbilical cord ». A premature baby needs the presence of its mother far more than a full-term newborn. When this presence is impossible, Dr Hugon asks the parents to record a cassette with 50% maternal voice, 30% paternal voice and 20% gentle music. A small microphone placed in the incubator allows the baby to listen to this recording for half an hour a day. One then observes that its face forms a smile, its limbs relax and it falls asleep — rediscovering signals carrying love and security.
Research in perinatal psychoneurology has documented links between the mother’s emotional state during pregnancy and the development of the infant. Doctor Levin, a dental surgeon from Manchester, established relationships between the mother’s states of stress and the consequences of catecholamines — the stress hormones — on the enamel layers of the baby’s milk teeth, already forming in the womb. Fortunately, the mother can act positively: in states of joy, happiness and well-being, she secretes endorphins which communicate to the child tranquillity and the joy of living.
In our era, when we proclaim the rights of man and of the child, would it not be urgent to recognise that the first of a human being’s rights is the right to a conception, a gestation, a birth and an education that give them, from the very beginning, the best possibilities of succeeding in life.
🎯 Quiz — Module 3: Scientific research
⚠️ Complete this quiz before continuing.
Q1. At what foetal age is the cochlea functionally mature?
A) 3 months
B) 4.5 months
C) 7 months
D) At birth
Q2. T/F — APP is validated by level 1 randomised controlled trials.
Q3. What role does myelination play in the development of listening?
✅ Answers
1. B) 4.5 months of pregnancy. From that moment, the foetus actively perceives its sound environment.
2. False. It rests on series of longitudinal cases. Wikipedia classifies the method as ‘pseudoscience’ for lack of published randomised trials. The practitioner must be aware of this and honest with their patients.
3. The myelination of the auditory fibres accelerates nerve transmission and conditions the maturation of auditory processing — it progresses from birth until adolescence.