Bummer: Cicadas & Crickets Make My Tinnitus Worse?

My tinnitus has been progressively worse during the summer. I could not understand why until I realized that our house has been swarmed by cicadas and crickets this summer. I also sleep with open window with cicadas just outside.

I have high frequency cicadas, electric buzzing like tinnitus. It's also kind of reactive.

Does anybody know how loud the sound cicadas and crickets actually make is?

 

Cicadas can be very loud. Some larger species up to 120 dB.

Is it possible @David S that the cicadas and crickets are masking your tinnitus and then the brain tries to amplify the tinnitus signal making it be perceived louder by you?

Could you stay a few days somewhere else where you are not exposed to those noises so you could test this theory?

 

From inside a house with open windows? Hard to tell, probably less than 40 dB I would say. Does it cover your voice when you speak? Human speech is about 60 dB at one meter, if I am not mistaken. You can try to compare it to this.

 

To David S:

The loudest North American cicada is 105.9 decibels (!).

They are the loudest insect in the World.

This is the male's mating call.

When I first met my wife I imitated this sound in an effort to notify her of my interest.

She said that I could just cut out this Jim-Carey-like behavior.

 

This was our country house. Just there for the summer. Luckily I am back home now.

I hope this cools down because it is quite bad now.

 

For us with reactive tinnitus it might be a reason to be careful. I believe my tiny hair cells around 8,000 Hz are much more sound sensitive than the recommended 80 dB.

 

Would it be possible to get hearing damage from long term exposure to the sounds cicadas make? If not, why not?

If they can reach volumes up to 120 dB we would definitely recommend to avoid this if the sounds source was something else.

Are the cicadas any different?

The reason I'm asking that a friend argues that my listening to low volume music all night (35 dB average with 55 dB spikes measured) couldn't have been what triggered my latest tinnitus (which actually sounds a bit like cicadas or more like the electric buzz that's heard close to charging station when a electric car is charging). He argues that if such low levels music can damage the hearing people who sleep close to cicadas would all have hearing damage.

What's your thoughts on this?

 

These insects really caught me off guard tonight. I had a tennis match tonight at a park that was absolutely swarmed by these things. They were loud enough that I was having trouble hearing opponents call the score out from the other side of the net. The courts were surrounded by woods and so I'm guessing there were tons of them there. It was such an annoyance and I didn't have earplugs or anything. They were especially bad for at least the first hour that I was there and I'm kind of worried they may have further damaged my hearing. Unfortunately my phone is useless in measuring decibel levels and I didn't have my stand-alone SPL meter to measure.

 

At what distance though? it s hard to believe it would be 120 dB a few meters away.