Does Your Tinnitus Get Better When You Listen to a Similar Frequency Sound?

I use SineGen to try to make a noise that sounds like my tinnitus. When I listen to it for a few seconds and then turn it off, I notice my t is much less (I actually don't notice it at all unless I put my hands over my ears). However, if I listen to the same noise for a few minutes and then turn it off, I still hear my tinnitus. Have any of you experienced this? I made a recording of the noise and silence and I am listening to it on a loop. I wonder if my T will improve if I play this while I'm sleeping. Maybe I can retrain my brain? Thoughts?

 

Sounds like you are using musical editing software which is over my head but if you invent something that works and takes only a few seconds and could be used intermittently (rather than a few hours a day like Neuromonics) you will really be onto something!

 

Dak,what version do you have & where did you download from?

 

I have version 2.1 but I don't remember where I got it from. @Tamar here is a photo to help explain what I did (Don't worry, I didn't do anything complicated).

 

Mine gets a lot worse with masking lately.

 

residual inhibition works for me, yes. but unfortunately only for a few seconds.

 

Yes, if I play my exact T tone it disappears for a couple of seconds.

 

I wonder if hypnosis combined with listening to your T sound could rewire the brain to unhear the T. Or 'gamify' this effect somehow similar to the Plasticity T game...

 

I have mentioned this in other posts, but I will relate my story again here. I am often able to turn off my tinnitus for the entire day by taking a shower. I have been doing this for years now. It doesn't always work; but when it does, my tinnitus does not reappear until I wake up the next morning. I expect this is residual inhibition. The shower needs to be loud and presumably contain the "correct" tonal frequencies. I have never been able to reproduce this effect outside the shower.

-Golly

 

Tinnitus Tamer works on this concept, playing your T freq with intervals of silence, supposedly to teach you brain that the tone "can" stop ?!

 

Sounds like that mute button device could work wonders for some people..isnt theres based on kinda the same concept?

 

@Golly that's amazing! I must ask, have you ever tried to record the sound of your shower and play it back? I would guess you have. High quality recording gear and especially in-ear headphones would probably be a must.

 

That makes sense to me, since in effect your brain really stops interpreting the T sound for a while. Maybe this could be enhanced with vagus nerve stimulation at the same time? The brain and it's neuroplasticity is a wonder...

 

@Golly

Very nice. Why not shower every day Golly That's really nice, I feel as if I'm experiencing something a bit alike, when I step into a completely quiet room straight from the shower, it feels like my old silence (which felt loud), after some time my t slowly returns - perhaps I get a loudness and very stable tone on both ears which I consider silence, and as it turns unstable morsing, hissing and beeping returns

 

I have thought about that. If I could just generate similar frequencies and listen on dry land it should, in principle, work. Perhaps I have not been turning the volume up high enough.

-G

 

Needless to say, I am very clean as a direct consequence of this trick. I am not sure why it works sometimes and not others. However, I usually know when it will work in advance. On days when the tinnitus sets in slowly upon waking, I can usually eliminate the hiss with a shower. Also, after taking Klonopin (which I do twice a week), if my tinnitus is not already gone upon waking, the shower tends to work its wonders.

When I posted about this some time ago, other chimed in to say that they could do the same thing:

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/shower-can-give-me-prolonged-suppression.1818/

-G

 

I moved my shower related question to that thread...

 

I just tried the hushtinnitus site to experiment with residual inhibition which seems to be based on the same idea -- playing your tinnitus frequency for a few seconds or minutes and filling in the sounds that your brain is missing from hearing loss. According to the theory, the brain' neurons stop misfiring because the brain hears the missing sound and the tinnitus temporarily disappears. Didn't work for me ; glad it works for Seal and others. I'll try it a few more times and will look up tinnitus tamer. Where there's hope....

 

I use a residual inhibition method to give myself a few T free seconds. I found a frequency that did the trick, turned it into a 12 second mp4 and put it on my iPhone. I hold the phone 7" from my left ear and play the mp4. I get about 10 T free seconds. I also found that if I do it a second time immediately I don't get the 10 T free seconds.