Abstract

Alfred Tomatis, a French ENT doctor in the post-war period, started to occupy himself already early in his career with hearing and its connection to the human mind. In the course of his extensive work he discovered, among other things, that each language can be described by a corresponding so-called “speech ethnogram”, which indicates the language’s characteristic frequency range and plays an important role when learning a foreign language. Based on these findings, he also developed a special method of training. Empiric data gained from experimental series show that by utilising the Tomatis-Method, foreign languages can be learned up to 50% faster.

The first part of the diploma thesis at hand comprises a summary of Tomatis’ agenda and findings, a presentation of his theories as well as a description of his working methods. Furthermore the teachings of the classical medicine are opposed to those of Tomatis and the two subsequently compared to each other. In this matter, special attention is given to the differing views on the theory of sonic forwarding in the human ear. The second part of this work takes up the evaluation of the above described “speech ethnograms”. Since Tomatis’ “ethnograms” are in no way reproducible, an independent comparison of the spectral curves of German, English and French is being developed in order to determine and depict their differences.

Evaluating the graphs definitely shows differences in the compared spectra. Eventually, a comparison could not be made between the calculated graphs and Tomatis’ “ethnograms” for methodical discrepancies.

Full Text and additional Material

You can download the full version of the diploma thesis here.

Disclaimer

The Institute of Broadband Communications joined the Signal Processing and Speech Communications Laboratory in 2011.
Therefor you will find diploma theses and student projects which were conducted at the Institute of Broadband Communications here at the SPSC.