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Alfred TOMATIS,
born 1 January 1920 in Nice and deceased on 25 December 2001
in Carcassonne, was a French ENT doctor at the Paris Faculty
of Medicine, a specialist of hearing and language disorders.
He was the son of a great singer, Humbert
Tomatis, Basso Profondo at the Opéra de Paris and so from an
early age be became familiar with the world of music and
opera. This double training, first familial then medical, was
to have a considerable influence in the direction taken by
Alfred Tomatis's career, as he very soon came to develop an
avid interest in the relationship between the ear and the
voice.
Tomatis was above all a peerless clinician gifted with
exceptional intuition. The thousands of clinical observations
which he made in his research on occupational deafness carried
out for the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Aviation
and Shipyards, enabled him to establish the relationship
between hearing and phonation, and by extension that between
listening and communication.
Apart from his career as a clinician and lecturer, Tomatis
had occasion to teach for many years in Paris, at the
School of Anthropology and the School of Practitioner
Psychologists, as well as at English-speaking Universities.
He left behind many works, articles
and interviews, some of which have been translated into
various languages, providing us with a better understanding of
the foundations of the Tomatis method.
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