Heart and soul

Soul Music is already into its 11th series on Radio 4 (Tuesdays, after lunch), but it just gets better and better. On TV the idea behind it (to explore the great works of the classical repertoire as well as pop songs and their impact on us) would by now seem jaded, the graphics tired, the personalities being interviewed too self-conscious. But it’s as if in this new series (produced by Rosie Boulton) we’re only just getting to the heart of the matter.

Don’t miss this week’s programme which looks at a very familiar work, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, but takes us on a quite different journey as we listen to fragments of the melody threaded through the dialogue. There’s no narration; just a series of edited comments from musicians who’ve played the piece and know it inside-out and medical experts trying to work out why it has such power, such resonance.

Alex Smith, who runs the Listening Centre in Lewes, East Sussex, uses this ethereal, mellifluous chamber music as part of his work with disturbed children and adults suffering from tinnitus or other auditory problems. You can have excellent hearing, he explains, but poor listening ability. Some people are left-ear dominant, which means that when they are being spoken to the sounds of speech take longer to arrive at the speech-processing area of the brain. Others cut themselves off from listening properly because of the difficulties of their situation. Using a special electronic listening machine developed by a French ENT consultant, Alfred Tomatis, Smith retrains the ear by playing music that forces the muscles of the middle ear to stretch and then relax, turning them from flabby, useless vessels to taut and vibrant conduits of sound. The best music, he says, to thread through the machine is Mozart.