Tuning in to Sound

Jan Johnson

Anyone who has flopped down in a chair listening to their favourite music to unwind has experienced to some extent the power of Sound Therapy. Music is often a trigger for certain emotions, depending on our experience and the associated effect. Music can influence our mood. The gentle music that is played in some supermarkets and shopping complexes is designed to slow you down and encourage you to browse (and buy more). Some dentists use relaxing music in the waiting room and surgery for the obvious effect of producing a calmer patient. Music can stimulate your sense of rhythm and fun in party mode; it can also create a sombre, reflective mood; some ‘heavy metal’ type of music has been reported to increase incidences of road rage in aggressive drivers. Certain music can boost our energy levels and revitalise. It is this therapeutic music that is the subject of this article – music that has been specially developed to enhance listening skills and develop auditory pathways.

Dr. Alfred Tomatis was an eminent French ear, nose and throat specialist whose experimentation and simulation of the effects of sounds on the unborn child in the uterus have led to the growing awareness of the importance of high frequency sounds. The organ of hearing starts to develop very early in pregnancy and by the fifteenth week the central cochlea area of the inner ear (which processes high frequency sounds) is fully functional. It is through the auditory and tactile senses that a baby starts the learning process even before birth. Neurological pathways are already being laid down. If the development of auditory pathways is inhibited for some reason, the brain will compensate and find alternative routes, which might not necessarily be the most efficient routes for the development of language. Tomatis' early work filtering out low frequency sounds has now been combined with the science of psychoacoustics in order to produce home programmes to develop listening skills that may have been lost or developed inefficiently.

Sound Therapists will normally test for hearing and listening anomalies before a client embarks on a programme of Sound Therapy. Though it is not wise to try and read too much into the results of an audiogram, it is often found that a dyslexic person’s hearing pattern will be less efficient in the language frequency range, though still well within acceptable hearing levels. Those who find it difficult to concentrate will often be more sensitive at the upper end of the spectrum. People with autism or Aspergers syndrome often have extremely sensitive hearing, which may explain in some part why they need to close into themselves to compensate. There may be quite noticeable peaks and troughs in adjacent frequencies. In some cases this can also be linked to stress. Sound Therapy can address these anomalies and help to establish a more efficient hearing curve, ‘ironing out’ some of the hearing sensitivities and boosting inefficiencies.

Many dyslexics are left ear dominant which is less efficient when it comes to language processing as most of the language centres in the brain are in the left hemisphere. Words heard by the right ear are processed initially by the left hemisphere and words heard by the left ear pass from the right hemisphere to the left with about 20 milliseconds delay. If the right ear is dominant, the message will be clear, augmented by the left ear’s contribution – location of sound. If neither ear is dominant, the result is auditory confusion when words or syllables can appear to be reversed. All young children produce charming mispronunciations like ‘skeletope’ (telescope) or ‘tefalone’ (telephone). Many dyslexics struggle for much longer with speech articulation and some mispronunciations persist into adulthood. An additional problem may be the inability to distinguish ‘signal’ from ‘noise’ – whereby concentrating on a teacher’s voice against the background of classroom activity becomes almost impossible. Many Sound Therapy CDs and tapes have been developed with a weighting to the right ear to encourage right dominance where this is thought to be appropriate.

Sound Therapy, in all its various forms, is basically a ‘workout’ for the middle ear. It assists the ‘hammer and anvil’ mechanisms to pass on auditory information with greater accuracy and efficiency. Muscles that have been put out of action for any reason (broken leg, arm, etc.) start to waste through inactivity. When they are restored to health they need to be exercised to regain their former strength. The same is true for the tiniest muscles in the middle ear. The eardrum that receives dull vibrations for much of the time becomes dull and flaccid itself. Sound Therapy awakens a new spectrum of listening and awareness and the music itself is specially chosen for the effect it has on the psyche. The combination is a powerful tool that can have huge physical and psychological benefits, and this article has only been able to touch briefly on some of the aspects that may be applied to dyslexics. It is not a cure, and it only addresses part of a very complex picture, but it is starting to look at some of the underlying processes which, for some, make sound and language so difficult to comprehend and to learn.

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