Ear Lets Out a Loudish Squeal Lasting 2 Seconds When Listening to Music? Is This Hyperacusis?

Is this a part of hypercusis? Music already sounds a bit distorted to me but when I try to listen to music after resting my ears for a bit, suddenly a loudish squeal about 2 seconds long appears during the music and goes away, sometimes I get a loud beep instead of the squeal.

I get it sometimes when someone talks too loud or a cart gets slammed, however my tinnitus reacts to every sound.

I wonder if these loudish short squeals/beeps during hearing stuff means it might all be related to hypercusis even though there’s no pain?

I have no idea how to fix this.

My tinnitus will react to sounds even without my hearing aid in.

Does anybody else get this?

 

I have exactly what you describe. It's more present some days than others. All music is ruined for me, and I used to be probably the most obsessive music listener on the planet on top of being a musician myself. Can't listen to music without a barrage of squealing, morse code tones, geiger counter clicks, instruments sounding out of tune/muffled etc.

 

I don't know what the hell it's supposed to be caused by. Mine started from a cold virus a year ago way before COVID-19. It started in November 2019. It's still here with me a year later. I have just started get tests done by doctors because mine is pretty bad and COVID-19 delayed appointments.

First ENT shrugged it off and the second one cares more to try to figure out what's causing it. I heard inflammation can cause this too but everybody is different.

 

I have hdad exactly the same issues for 9 weeks now. I went to 3 different ENTs and nobody could help me with this problem. I think the only thing we can do is to wait and hope our ears will heal themselves.

 

I haven’t had this before. Is this not dysacusis?

 

I have hyperacusis, reactive tinnitus and noise distortion but I can't say I experience anything similar. Our ears can do very strange things when they're not working correctly, I'm sorry you're experiencing this

To answer your question, sound distortion is listed as a part of hyperacusis so it could very well be part of that.

 

My distortions seem to be lessening at an extremely glacial pace. Hopefully in a few months they subside. It can take years for this to go away. I've read extremely obsessively on this condition and I can only think of one out of 30+ cases I've found where the distortions persist.

 

Sound distortions are a part of "loudness hyperacusis". Dysacusis isn't really a condition, just more or less an umbrella term for any kind of distortion of sound.

 

I will get next month 3x intratympanic steroids.

It's my last hope, maybe it's too late but what can I lose. I will report back after it is done.

 

I think being on steroids is what gave me sound distortions in the first place. Probably made my cilia so sensitive that I mowed them down with headphone usage.

 

That is horrible. So sorry to hear you suffer from that. I just have the run of the mill high pitched ringing in my ears all day that I have gotten used to. I also have a new pulsing sound, like my heart beat, that just started up a few weeks ago and that's what brought me here.

I have had a hearing experience similar to yours when I was in the hospital and they gave me the drug Ketamine to knock me out before they defibrillated me. That is one terrible drug. It has hallucinogenic activity and messed up my hearing like you describe. When people talked to me it was like a garbled mess of computer generated tones. Not only was sound like that but vision was too. Everything was made of pixels. I thought I had died and this was hell, hell was a big computer and I was stuck in it forever. Never been so scared.

I'd hate to have that sound frequently. Problems like you have seem to be more involved than just the hearing organs, maybe it involves the hearing portion of the brain too?

 

I pray after a year of having this I become fortunate somehow and it'll hopefully be gone by the end of next year... not the tinnitus itself but the distortions. I'm going to try a few things after Christmas to see if it helps. There was a guy who had this for 2 years and then it went away.

 

I get this but not necessarily from music. My main tinnitus sounds will suddenly get overridden with a sad howling noise or a beep. Only lasts a few seconds until the main noises come back. Does this sound similar? Normally it doesn't happen at the moment of exposure though.

 

Man, this shit is making me hella suicidal today. I get loud whistles, squealing, hissing, static, clipping, a hodgepodge of horrid tones. Not even "reactive tinnitus", but the actual sound becoming distorted. Might as well kill myself.

 

Hang in there. It might just go away on its own. I wouldn't give up just yet. I have a form of reactive tinnitus and I can hear distortion especially with high male voices and female voices, only at certain levels and at certain pitches, it's annoying as hell, but with hope and the passing of time it will eventually disappear.

Don't give up. The longer you hold out, the less suicidal you'll feel. Believe me, I've been there and I've experienced these exact same thoughts, even right through to planning, but I decided not to go ahead with it. I thought that waiting it out might help even if it seemed so counterintuitive at the time. Even though I so desperately wanted the very thing that was causing my suicidal ideation to stop... I had to stop thinking about it, even though it was bothering me all day. Insomnia was the biggest problem, but I was able to overcome that with the help of certain medications (not benzos, doctors here won't prescribe those for sleep problems, but they will prescribe Nortriptyline or Mirtazapine).

Don't give up hope just yet.

 

I have had this same problem for three months now. Would you describe your distortions like a squeak or someone rubbing their finger on a glass?

 

Quite similar, but not exactly how I would describe it. More like a flutish sound, like a "resonance" that gets "excited" at certain volume levels but it's considerably lower than what it was, like about 40% less loud than it was during the first week (this episode of tinnitus/hyperacusis started on the 21st December last year). 4 weeks in and it's quite a bit lower, but it's still noticeable especially when I wear ear plugs. I suspect this could potentially be a middle-ear condition, since my GP told me a couple of weeks ago that my ear drums didn't look too healthy - my right ear was about as bad as my left ear. He prescribed a 7 day course of antibiotics (Amoxicillin) and that helped to reduce the tinnitus, say 40% (as far as the baseline tinnitus was concerned) and the distortion became less bothersome although it's still there but it's not as noticeable as it once was. So I think a recovery is certainly possible, but an ENT told it could easily take 3 to 6 months for a more-or-less complete recovery.

Also, the brain itself can cause this form of tinnitus in response to sensorineural hearing loss (almost always due to loud noise, but this type of hearing loss can also be caused suddenly - by autoimmune assault and viral assault), so it all depends on how bad the hearing loss is, but the level of hearing loss isn't actually related to the level of tinnitus, as in some cases moderate to severe hearing loss can result in mild tinnitus, whereas more moderate tinnitus has been found with slight hearing loss, especially in the upper-midrange frequencies. The more upper-midrange frequencies are involved, generally the worse the tinnitus will be, especially between 3 kHz and 6 kHz.

 

Ben, can I ask how you sorted yourself out? Which medication did you take for sleep? And once you were sleeping better, did you start to see other changes?

 

I totally have this. I can say it nails 480 Hz exactly, sounds like a wine glass hum, and plays often in my ears (especially if a white noise like source is on an angle from my ears, the ear "further" from the source gets hit with massive wine glass humming).

Oddly in the ear I have that humming, if I make a triangle wave at that frequency and listen to it, I get a double sound.

The 480 Hz triangle, and... something else as a triangle... maybe a flatter frequency.

At any rate, completely distinct.

 

Do you think this will go away? I have had this now for 4 months and have had no improvement, it's still the same as Day 1. Could it maybe be TTTS and the muscle causing this crazy thing?

 

There's no way an eardrum flexing is a thing. Impossible. It's low thudding tinnitus.
I think it's secondary hydrops. As for will it get better? I have no clue... maybe with a blood patch or steroids, but after that only time would tell. Diet so far has been useless.

Honestly if those two sounds leave I can live with the rest... strangely... I just can't fucking concentrate at work, without being able to enjoy moments and use my mind thudfree I'm useless / way slower.

 

As a precursor to my severe dysacusis, I had a reactive tone at around 900 Hz ish and it would interact with music (in kind of a funny way, before it got super debilitating), I was listening to a lot of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and any time a guitar or violin would strike the note A#5 I would get a double tone that sounded identical to the source but sharp... that took about a month and a half to go away for me.

 

So Keppra didn’t help your dysacusis at all?

 

No. It waxes and wanes. It decreased significantly when I stopped taking Flonase but today it's ramping up again.

 

I have a lightsaber going on.

Quite literally sounds like Darth Vader is swinging wildly in my head. It'd be funny if it could be masked, unfortunately it's over videos, music and cars passing by now. Very low hum, wavering and erratic as hell.

Starting to think I really have hydrops or even otosclerosis triggered by all these events. ENT seems a bit more convinced since my ears started hurting if I raise my voice and low frequencies are getting a bit lower in threshold on my tests over the last months on average (10 dB since October).

 

I think hyperacusis, as an umbrella word, has a pretty simple definition. Are sounds directly intolerable and does the loudness of the noise make it more intolerable? From here, there are a bunch of subtypes.

I wouldn't consider reactive tinnitus as a direct symptom of hyperacusis, although it's extremely common for people with hyperacusis to have it.

I also wouldn't consider sound distortion to be a part of hyperacusis unless the sound directly causes some sort of strong intolerance. By direct, I mean either pain and/or something that the limbic and autonomic nervous system rejects completely.

If the debilitation is from missing the way music used to sound, this is still torture (sometimes even more torturous), but I think it's a different disorder -- namely, dysacusis.

 

The medical world doesn't even have a recognized term for this kind of reactive tinnitus. I wish they took the time to classify things.

Don't listen to the guy who says reactive tinnitus is a form of hyperacusis, He gives bad information.