Brain Activator​

​

​In the early 1950s, Prof. Alfred Tomatis built a device meant to provide therapeutic support to his research in the field of hearing and phonetics. His invention was awarded a gold medal at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.  During an interview with a journalist, Tomatis came up with the name 'Electronic Ear'. The inventor immediately secured the exclusive rights to reproduce his equipment, so that the therapists trained by Tomatis had to buy the equipment from him. Until the year 2000, the Atlantis Institute used only the original Tomatis equipment.

 

Jozef Vervoort, also trained by Tomatis, had many ideas for expanding the functions of the Electronic Ear, in particular in the domain of vocal improvement. Vervoort tried to implement his ideas with the available device, but made no real progress. He, then, decided to seek technical assistance from two collaborators of the University of Limburg. Unfortunately, a few years into the project they demanded huge sums of money for development and a guaranteed purchase of numerous devices. Vervoort decided to cancel the project.

 

By chance, he met a professor who taught at the Technical University of Dortmund, in the Ruhr region of northern Germany. With the help of one of his graduate students, and a company in Witten, the Brain Activator was completed in the early 2000s. All of Jozef Vervoort's ideas for the new device were discussed with Alfred Tomatis before starting development. The original founder of the therapy agreed, for example, to abandon the fixed limit of 1,000 Hz, in order to stimulate other brain areas, and to use the 24-bit format. 

 

Many of Jozef Vervoort and his team's ideas for improvement came in great part from his daily therapy work and observations. The versatility of the device was soon confirmed when, in 1996, a stutterer who came to the Sint-Truiden center was successfully treated. Thanks to the application of a 687 milliseconds delay, which represents the latency between hearing the words and speaking them, his stuttering was completely eliminated.

 

Mozart Brain-Lab is at the forefront as far as engineering and innovation of this type of device. The original Tomatis 'Electronic Ear' dates from 1972. In comparison, the Brain Activator prototype was a very advanced improvement with many new applications, while the latest devices are ideal for contemporary therapy.

 

Mozart's music, Gregorian chant and mother's voice, played via headphones during the therapy, are modified by an electronically controlled amplification and filter system. The neurological effects of the stimulation translate into an improved auditory perception and a reorganization of the auditory processes.

 

Jozef Vervoort has other ideas in mind for the brain activator of the future. "I want to achieve even more with the therapy and take it to an even higher level."