"...awareness of the specificity of tone has always been the center of my life."(Nancy Garniez}
HOW IT WORKS
Home Page • People Respond • Auditory Awareness • Private Sessions • Group Sessions • About  Nancy Garniez • TONALRefractions • Order On-line: The Tonal Refraction ® Store ©2006 Nancy Garniez. All rights reserved.	Tonal Refraction has been developed in the course of my work since 1992 with nearly one hundred different players and listeners with a full range of training and competence (from complete beginner to successful professional) and an equally broad range of musical difficulties. (See: PEOPLE RESPOND) As is the case of any method, it would be foolish to claim that Tonal Refraction is 100% effective. Some people's difficulties are too severe or have been too prolonged to allow response; in such cases other modalities of training or therapy might prove more effective. However, the overwhelming benefit of Tonal Refraction for the musical lives of a great many people has been amply demonstrated. One of the reasons for Tonal Refraction's effectiveness and efficiency is that, performed in total silence, the process engages the mind's integrated experience of music rather than isolating physical, emotional or intellectual aspects of a problem, as is often the case with instrumental instruction and with many traditional therapies. Music is such a positive force that most people, recognizing the relevance of a musical insight that validates their own personal responses, will respond hopefully, even joyously, whereas other techniques, applied without this kind of graphic affirmation, might risk calling up associations that inhibit response. In other words, because the approach is not associated with any specific form of music study, it is untainted, and is usually experienced as refreshing. In many cases it opens a welcome prospect of expanding musical creativity in which the inevitable mix of memory, emotion, habit, and expectation enriches rather than inhibits musical satisfaction. These notions of opening and expanding reflect the very origin of Tonal Refraction, which came into being in 1991 shortly after a new development in physical therapy, the TENS (Transcutaneous Electronic Nerve Stimulation) unit, gave me unimpeded use of my left arm, enabling me for the first time in my life to play large-scale piano works without muscle spasms. As I began to prepare solo piano recitals I was sure that at last I could show graphically what it was in the sound of the piano that had so fascinated me all my life and fueled my passionate desire to play the instrument. It was as if my childhood experience of the sound had remained intact despite years of frustration and alternative musical involvement. Twice in my teaching life I have been explicitly asked by prominent scientists in different disciplines, both devoted amateur musicians: "Where is the music part?" "Where does the feeling come from?" I am deeply convinced, after fifteen years of using this method with others, that Tonal Refraction identifies the music part, the feeling part, as rooted in the act of pitch perception itself. Once this has been noticed, one is empowered to savor the riches of an adult musical life.