On Good Health and
We have proven over the last
Gregorian Chant
From the bulletin of Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Latin Mass Community, Littleton, Colorado
(Father James Jackson, FSSP, Chaplain)
An interview with a famous French Audiologist, named
Dr. Alfred Tomatis, took place in May of 1978, and was the
core of a CBC Radio Documentary called “Chant.” Due
to the great interest in the interview, it was re-broadcast
several times, and then played on NPR in the States with
similar results.
Dr. Tomatis did a good deal of work with opera singers in
his clinic, and concluded that the human voice can produce
only what the ear hears. While this was a kind of heresy in
the medical community at the time, eventually the French
Academy officially recognized his observation by naming it
after him. He showed that the two organs are part of the same
neurological loop, such that change in the response of one will
show up immediately in the other. Though most of us intui-
tively feel this to be sound, the unity of the organic function
has not impressed itself among many audiologists and speech
pathologists (you can test this by twirling a q-tip in your ear
and feeling a tickling in your throat). In major hospitals, the
two departments are often found at opposite ends of the build-
ing. I suppose someone or some corporation has a lot invested
in this sort of separation.
If they didn’t seem to fit so coherently into his view of human
potential, and to be borne out in day-to-day clinical experience
with everyone from dyslexic children to Benedictine monks,
some of his pronouncements might appear as if they could only
be taken on faith. “The skin is really differentiated ear, not the
other way around;” “We spend the whole of our lives seeking to
recover the audition of the fetus;” “Gregorian Chant is meant
to train one to rise up out of the body.” These are the sorts of
things you’d have expected to hear from Marshall McLuhan –
who was a strong Catholic – as well as Tomatis.
I will give a number of quotes that he made, in the order he
made them, in the hope that his thoughts would be as fascinating
and as enlightening to you as they were to me. I’ll paraphrase
some of the talk, so that it will fit better into this format.
“We can only ask why, for thousands of years, peo-
ple have chanted. They have come to an intuitive real-
ization that there is probably something in the ear that
it is possible to awaken, or at least to excite. And mod-
ern research has proved to us that there are two kinds
of sound. There are sounds which for some time now
I have termed ‘discharge’ sounds (those sounds which
tire and fatigue the listener) and ‘charge’ sounds (those
which give tone, health).
twenty years that in order for the brain to remain dy-
namic, to think and operate with vitality, it must have
sensorial stimuli. A group of Americans has been able
to demonstrate the number of such stimuli that are
necessary. We know now that the brain needs at least
three billion stimuli per second for at least four and
a half hours per day, in order for a person to remain
conscious, that is wide awake.
“Let me tell you of a personal experience. It goes
back several years. I had visited a monastery in France
which had just been taken over by a new abbot, a
young man. He had changed the internal rule of the
abbey by modifying everything a little after the Sec-
ond Vatican Council, and he was therefore something
of a revolutionary.
“When I arrived, there were those who wanted to
retain the Latin, others who were for the existing rule
and still others who wanted to change and revolution-
ize everything. Finally everything was changed. They
even eliminated chanting from the daily schedule. You
know that Benedictines chant from six to eight hours
a day, but this abbot succeeded in demonstrating that
chant served no useful purpose and that without it
they could recapture that time for other things.
“Well, in fact, these people had been chanting in
order to ‘charge’ themselves, but they hadn’t real-
ized what they were doing. And gradually, as the days
passed, they started to get bogged down; they became
more and more tired. Finally they got so tired that
they held a meeting and frankly asked themselves
what it was that was causing their fatigue. They
looked at their schedule and saw that their night vig-
il and the rhythm of their work deviated excessively
from the norm for other men. They seemed to live too
differently from the rest of the world, and they sel-
dom slept. They decided that they should go to bed
early and wake up, like everybody else, only when they
were no longer tired. Well, everybody knows from
physiology that the, more you sleep, the more tired
you are, and so it was for the poor Benedictines - they
were more tired than ever. So much so that they called
in medical specialists to help them try to understand
what was happening. They finally gave up on this af-
ter a procession of doctors had come through over a
period of several months, and the monks were more
tired than ever. Then they turned to specialists of the
digestive system. One of the great French doctors ar-
rived at the conclusion that they were in this state
because they were undernourished. In fact, they were
practically vegetarian – they ate a little fish from time
to time – and he told them they were dying of star-
vation. I think my colleague’s error was in forgetting
that they had eaten as vegetarians ever since the 12th
Century, which one would think might have engen-
dered some sort of adaptation in them. Anyway, once
they started eating meat like the rest of the world,
things only got worse.
“I was called by the Abbot in February, and I found
that 70 of the 90 monks were slumping in their cells
like wet dishrags. Over the next several months I ex-
amined them, installed machines, and began the
treatment of re-awakening their ears. I put the ma-
chines in in June, 1967, and I re-introduced their
chanting immediately. By November, almost all of
them had gone back to their normal activities, that is
their prayer, their few hours of sleep, and the legend-
ary Benedictine work schedule.”
When asked about how he was treating the monks, he re-
sponded,
“With sound only. We know what sounds are stim-
ulating and we also have the technology to be able,
in fact, to re-charge people with them. You have to
realize that to meditate, to reach the plane of prayer,
demands extraordinary cortical activity. Put your-
self on your knees one day and try to pray, or try to
meditate and you’ll see how parasitic thoughts assail
you – your vacation is coming up, the friend who’s
displeased you, the letter you just received, the taxes
you have to pay – thousands of things flood to the
mind. To disengage yourself from all that you have to
dominate your subconscious and have an enormous
cortical charge. In the case of these monks, in giving
them back their sounds, their stimuli, we succeeded
in re-awakening them.
“The ear has presented us with a scientific problem
(let alone an atheistic and spiritual one) of enormous
proportions. The human ear has functions that have
been completely ignored. We have known that one of
those is to assure balance, but we haven’t followed
through the implications of this. The ancients who
were less rich in technology had more time to reflect,
and came to a more acute understanding of sound
than we’ve been able to. They discovered the follow-
ing: first of all, they realized that certain sounds re-
leased certain postural phenomena. In India there is
a whole yoga of sound, Mantra yoga. In mantra yoga,
the posture has to be perfect for the mantra to work,
which explains why some people have destroyed
themselves in doing the mantra without knowing the
key to proper listening. A mantra can damage a per-
son much faster than it can restore him.
“What the ancients knew was that once one reach-
es perfect auditory posture, the body reaches out and
literally incorporates all the sound that comes from
outside. The subject identifies with himself, knows
himself, touches himself both from outside and from
within. Secondly, he assumes a posture that stresses
verticality. It is impossible to arrive at good language
without verticality, or to stimulate the brain to full
consciousness. If the posture isn’t perfect, it is very
difficult to enter truly into real consciousness.”
It is not a casual observation that he found the aurally
depleted monks “slumping” in their cells. Not only, he discov-
ered, does a different posture change the way one hears, but
the opposite. When he altered the listening curve of certain
subjects, their posture immediately changed. Tomatis is also
a prodigious linguist. He observes that the word “malady”
etymologically implies bad posture, and suggests that his lis-
tening “cure” is the reversal of this.
“If you listen to music, especially if you’re trying to
listen carefully to classical music, you take on a spe-
cial kind of posture. The head tilts forward a little,
which actually raises its top-most point.
“Alright, how does the ear function in all of this?
Well, its real function is unconsciously to assure real
balance. But in saying balance we are saying a great
deal, much more than just physical equilibrium. It
also means the tonus of the body. And it means all
the gestures, all of the non-verbal language the body
has with its environment. It is the ear which first es-
tablishes a spatial dynamic in the brain, on which the
visual system is later superimposed. So the first func-
tion of the ear is vestibular.
“The ear’s other role, the one we think we know
well enough about, is its cochlear function, the analy-
sis and de-coding of sounds from outside. We have
largely overlooked this role, however, vis-à-vis the
sounds generated from inside the body, particularly
the ear’s relation to our own voice. This function I call
self-listening, or auditory-vocal control.
“There is a third function of the ear, the one in-
volved in the story of the monks I told you about.
Doctors totally ignore this function, but zoologists
know it well, it being perhaps easier to see in the sim-
plest of animals, particularly in fish. This is that the
ear, the vibration sensor, serves to charge the organ-
ism with electrical potential. It is thanks to the ear
that external stimuli are able to charge the cortical
battery. I say electrical because the only way we know
of measuring the brain’s activity is through an elec-
troencephalogram, which gives an electrical answer.
But of course it’s not electricity that’s inside. All mod-
ification of internal metabolism is translated by elec-
tricity – that is all we know how to see. The internal
mechanisms which we call the neurological field are
illuminated, charged, by stimuli. These stimuli come,
we know, via the skin, the joints, the muscles, a thou-
sand things leading into our bodies from the outside.
But it is the ear which translates their potential to the
brain. And so we’ve come to realize that the skin is
only a piece of differentiated ear, and not the other
way around.
“The joints, the muscles, in other words the body’s
posture – everything we use to fight against gravity –
all this is tied to the labyrinth of the ear. It is the ear’s
vestibular labyrinth that keeps these all under con-
trol, which is balance. To this mechanism alone I be-
lieve we can credit 60% of the cortical charge. You also
have, thanks to the energy of the sounds themselves,
which is processed by the cochlea, a complementary
charge of about 30%. Thus the ear accounts for from
90-95% of the body’s total charge.
“So to recharge people I will use at various stages
sounds such as a recording of one’s own mother’s
voice, filtered to simulate the listening one has pre-
natally; also music, but not just any kind of music,
because each kind has different results. Two kinds
in particular have given me results in every corner of
the world: the music of Mozart, and Gregorian chant
from the Abbey of Solesmes, particularly the dawn
and midnight Masses for Christmas.”
I hope you are finding this work as interesting as I find
it. The insistence school masters of old had on good posture
was “spot-on” as the Brits might say. To write well, to ride
a horse well, to sing well, to paint well, to shoot an arrow or
fire a gun well, to think well, to pray well; all these activities
demand good posture. It’s interesting to compare the posture
of the audience at a classical music concert, and the audience
at a rock concert, or of someone who is really listening in con-
versation to someone who is not listening at all. Another glar-
ing example is what happens to the posture of people who are
watching television.
That sound should be as connected to good health as pos-
ture should not be a surprise. Menninger’s clinic in Topeka,
KS (one of the premier psychological clinics in the U.S.), uses
things like Gregorian chant to help their patients. They also
keep the smell of baking bread in the air, since that is the smell
most conducive to mental health according to their research.
Sounds, smells, sights, tastes, touches all factor in to good
mental and physical health. One of the most effective things
to do with the sense of touch, for a person suffering from men-
tal anguish, is to have them pet a cat, and to hear at the same
time the purring sound that cat’s make.
“If you put an oscilloscope on the sounds of Gre-
gorian Chant, you see that they all come within the
bandwidth for charging the ear. There is not a single
sound which falls outside of this. Gregorian chant
contains all of the frequencies of the voice spectrum,
roughly from 70 cycles per second up to 9,000 cycles
per second, but with a very different envelope curve
from that of normal speech. There is a characteris-
tic slope which increases from low to high frequen-
cies by a minimum of 6 dB per octave, which is to
say an increase of 100% for each octave you go up the
scale. This increase can be as great as 18 dB for each
octave.
“The most important range for this activity is be-
tween 2,000 and 4,000 cycles per second, or about the
middle of the speaking range. It is this range which
gives timbre to the voice, whereas the lower frequen-
cies are used simply for the semantic system.”
These last two statements are most likely too technically
obtuse for most of the parish. But what follows is plainer:
“So if your voice has good timbre, is rich in over-
tones, you are charging yourself each time you use it,
and of course you are providing a benefit to whomev-
er hears you! Sometimes it’s easy to lose track of what
someone is saying, not because he isn’t interesting,
but because his voice is of poor timbre – it’s too ‘low.’
Instead of charging you, it discharges you. Thus the
sounds of Gregorian are, uniquely, a fantastic energy
food. And here’s an interesting detail. All the monas-
teries that closed down are the ones where they didn’t
chant.
“The second important thing about Gregorian is
that there is no tempo, there is only rhythm. If you
look closely at the Gregorian inflection, if you take an
Alleluia for example, you have the impression that the
subject never breathes. This slowest possible breath-
ing is a sort of respiratory yoga, which means that the
subject must be in a state of absolute tranquility in
order to be able to do it. And by inducing the listener
to enter into the same deep breathing, you lead him
little by little to something of the same tranquility.
“This is why one is so comfortable and at ease. It’s
the sensation you have when you are listening to a
great singer. You mimic him because, first of all, he
excites all of your higher proprioceptor responses,
and then you dilate to breathe strongly with him. You
become sure of the note that comes next. It is you who
sings the note and not him. He invites you to do it in
your own skin. Whereas with a bad singer you want
to die. He ties you in knots, he blocks you in, you’re
afraid, and nothing happens.
 “There is another element in the Gregorian, if you
listen well, still thinking of the Alleluia as an example.
You see that the antiphon has notes that are held, and
then suddenly they modulate to what seems like an
ending. That sort of ending is very interesting. If you
listen carefully, you notice that it is the beat of a calm
heart, the rhythm of a tranquil heartbeat ... systole,
diastole. In other words you take a subject, no matter
whom, who comes to church because he has problems
to straighten out inside. You lead him into a chant of
serene and supple respiration, and at a given moment
you’ll see his whole cardiac pattern calming. And little
by little a feeling of well-being comes over him.
“It may not be incidental, by the way, that Gre-
gorian was until recently always sung in Latin. The
stress of the Latin words happens to follow precisely
this serene physiological rhythm in us that is very
pure. You don’t get that when you superimpose many
vernacular languages, particularly French or English
with their articles, on chant. There’s a reef in the wa-
ter there!
How very true. I’ve heard many attempts to shoehorn
Gregorian melodies into modem English translations, and
they all fall flat. Tomatis invented a tool which he calls the
Electronic Ear, to change the way a person listens. He has had
remarkable success with it. For example, normally it takes a
young monk three to four years to adapt to the choir which is
using Gregorian. With the Electronic Ear, the process takes
about two to three months. This new training of the ear is to
achieve again the conduction which many of us lose, which
is precisely that of the fetus. The first object, the first focus of
attention in a human being is the faint solo in the symphony
of body sounds, which is the voice of the mother. It is a sound
which is filtered naturally by bone conduction so that pre-
cisely the same high frequencies are emphasized as are later
replicated by the Electronic Ear. But what about the low fre-
quency zone, such the use of the tom-tom in Hindu or Native
American music?
“The tom-tom exhausts the subject, which is why
it is able to put him into another state. Drumming
sounds gradually induce a loss of all awareness of the
body, through a game that goes on within the laby-
rinth of the ear. The low frequency, percussive sounds
cause exaggerated movement of the endolymphatic
liquid which begins to move, just as it would in an
elevator starting up. If this movement is too continu-
ous, the subject loses the image of his body, and en-
ters into a kind of hypnosis. Very few are able to resist
moving to the beat of a drum. It puts us at the mercy
of the drummer, a magus who can then do with his
listeners what he wants. Military marches, for exam-
ple, have long known how to exploit this phenome-
non. We can be out of breath, tired and all, and with a
good military march we move like one man. The high
frequencies in instruments like the trumpets and bag-
pipes provide all the charge you want, and the drums
provide a regimenting rhythm that makes you pick
yourself up even when you’re tired. But with the low
frequencies alone, you’d never be able to keep up.
I remember seeing a large crowd of people coming out of
a Japanese drum show (it was called “Kodo” or something),
and they were absolutely exhausted, with glassy eyes. You see
the same thing of people who leave a rock concert - not charged
but completely discharged. This phenomenon cannot be at-
tributed entirely to drugs or alcohol (though those are often
heavily used by the patrons of rock music). Rather, their ex-
haustion may be explained first by the excessive use of drums
in that music. This also accounts for their hypnotic state, a
trance which comes over their faces as they attend the concert.
So is chanting Gregorian a kind of hypnotism too?
“No. On the contrary. It is an awakening of the
field of consciousness. At the risk of oversimplifying,
hypnotic effects are those of relatively lower frequency
which play on the more primitive areas of the brain.
With Gregorian chant you are directly affecting the
cortex, which controls the monkey rather than being
led by him ...
“The church in which the Gregorian is sung is ex-
tremely important, because it must sing at the same
time. Its own resonance makes it unimportant wheth-
er there are six monks singing or a whole choir. The
walls of the church itself are excited, reverberating the
sound. And the whole technique of building churches
is to amplify the high frequencies, to give the sensa-
tion of another center of gravity above the head. Here
again is the stress on verticality.
There is some disagreement on what the optimal reverber-
ation should be for Gregorian in a church. Some say as low as
five seconds, others as high as eight. I’m no expert in these mat-
ters, so I can’t tell what the best is. The reverb in our church
is about one second. There is no way to improve it presently,
since we do not have the height in the ceiling. Those are the
three things you need for good liturgical music - height, length,
and solid surfaces (no carpets in churches please). The builders
of Romanesque and Gothic churches or cathedrals consciously
shaped the stone surfaces so as to create multiple reflections of
the higher frequencies. This was to give the feeling of the omni-
presence of God, a sense that the sound was coming not from
a single identifiable point but from all around.
“The sound produced is not in the mouth, not in
the body, but in fact in the bones. It is all the bones of
the body which are singing, and it’s like something vi-
brating the walls of the church, which also sings. The “I have spoken to musicians for years of these dis-
voice essentially excites bone conduction, giving the coveries. I show them the curve, but I haven’t found
impression the sound originates from ‘outside,’ from a single promising artist. Each seems to have the im-
beyond the body. This corresponds to many ascetic pression (it’s undoubtedly his ego defending itself)
ideals. The ascetic does not so much reject the body that he will create everything, do everything. He for-
as demonstrate his dominion over it. gets that to make music is, like for Blessed Fra An-
“In the past, some monks believed Gregorian was gelico, to paint for others and not for oneself.
to be sung like lyric songs. They pushed very hard and “And when we have the man in the street, who
sang Gregorian as if they were singing Othello. But thinks he’s doing something but who listens to noth-
this is false, because Gregorian is meant to train one ing and who obeys even less. It is for a monk and his
to rise up out of the body. meditation to bring himself to listening, to the point
“Years ago, when I was about 20 or 25, and I be- of absolute obedience. And the psychological prob-
gan to realize the efficacy of Gregorian, I used to have lem that I find most widespread today is that we have
problems in getting other people to listen to that mu- forgotten the notion, not only of listening, but of
sic. They were people who had something against the obeying. If you look in the scriptures, the word you
Church, or the Mass, and when they heard my Gre- find most often is ‘listen.’ The Rule of St Benedict be-
gorian they’d turn up their noses and say they hadn’t gins with the words, ‘Hear, O my son, the words of the
come to hear the Mass. Well, I couldn’t do anything Lord, and incline thy heart’s ear.’ And so everything
but play something else. Now, since the Church has begins with obedience. That is perfect listening.”
suppressed Gregorian, in France at least, people no
longer know what it is and it has taken its place again
for therapy. So much so that people who are com-
pletely opposed ideologically to anything that might
be the Church ask me, ‘What are those extraordinary
records that buoy you up so?’”
Well, officially Gregorian was never suppressed. But prac-
tically it was. The new Mass is for all practical purposes a
vernacular rite of Mass. Very frequently its most ardent sup-
porters are vehement about the necessity not to “go back” to
Latin. True, one hears of churches which put in a Kyrie now
and then, but most of the chant will never fit into the Mass of
Paul VI. With that being said, there are some chants which
were officially suppressed, such as the great sequence called
the Dies Irae, which is sung at the Requiem. It was judged
to be unfitting the theology of the new funeral rite (which is
true). But here again we realize that tradition is brand new,
with two whole generations that have no experience of it. The
subtle power of chant is remarkable. We have a great oppor-
tunity to evangelize with this. All the more why we should be
singing it in our church!
“When a monk has a high awareness of the pres-
ence of God, it is God singing through him. To ‘reach
out towards that to which one listens’ - in Latin that’s
ob audire, which translates to the word ‘obey.’ Unfor-
tunately, obedience is seen as a constraint; man does
not want to. Obedience is to let oneself go completely
in listening. And Who is speaking in chant? It is the
Logos, the Word of God Himself.”
Tomatis was then asked if he knew of any modern musi-
cians who are producing sacred music that achieves the effect
of Gregorian. Is anyone writing such music today?