My Tinnitus Can Be Completely Masked W/ Even Lowest Cricket Sound?!

Ok folks. This is so weird. I have been waiting to ask this for almost 3 weeks. I just wantee to be sure.

Now I have very very very high pitched T in both ears and mostly head that nothing can mask it. When I first got my tinnitus it was more a morse code eee eee ee e ee e sound that could be masked with everyday sound, TV, music etc. But this new tinnitus can only be masked with crickets. But there is something really weird with it. I do not have to blast the volume to cover my T. Even the lowest volume of the crickets can totally mask my T even it is really loud and high pitched inside of my head. I even do not have to put the sound near my ears. I put my phone somewhere away from me in my room and the crikets can still mask my T. Weird right?! on Do you know how is it possible?

Sorry for my silly question.

 

Does ACRN work for you? http://www.generalfuzz.net/acrn/

 

I tried some a month ago but it gave me temporary new tonal T tone.

 

I'd say the same about my tinnitus. Benzos are also part of my tinnitus story.

Walks in the woods around real crickets are awesome for many reasons.

 

I think I'll move to a forrest and live there till someone finds a cure.

 

pretty much my plan. but for several reasons, not just the tinnitus I grew up with acres of woods as my backyard, and that was "normal" to me -- want my kids to have the same experience

 

So glad you found something that gives you relief Beste!
I'd move to Greece. Constant crickets, beautiful weather, nice beaches !

 

Hey! That is amazing! I live in Turkey, very close to Greece. We also have great beaches full of cricket sounds. I wish I didn't have to work. I would build a nice wooden house and chill till the end of my life

Have fun there

 

For me its the same. I have never used benzos in my life though.

If you have T mainly on one side you can try the following experiment. Try to hold the cell phone with the sound on the good ear and set the volume to low but audible. Put the cell phone to the T ear then. Can you hear it? I can't. I must have hearing loss in this frequencies. For me this was very weird.

Anyway I think the reason why this masking works so well is some brain effect similar to residual inhibition. RI neans neurons are exhausted for a while when excessivly stimulated. In our case I think the brain has to tune into the false/imaginated signal to create the full T blast. Like a feedback loop. But even slight stimulations from outside at the right frequencies, in our case circadas, block this tune in process and T remains at a low level.
BTW In signal processing there is some kind of similar phenomenon: IIR filter which can become instable likewise.

 

Well, we have some good relief but don't you think it is very weird that we still cannot find our permanent relief even we are this close. Now, this cicadas sound is open on my phone at thevlowest volume and I do not hear the T.

 

If crickets at a very low volume masks your T, why not listen to it all the time and try to forget about tinnitus? At that low of a volume I can't see it doing any harm.
I wish crickets worked on me.

That's an interesting theory. I do not experience residual inhibition at all, likewise, I can't really mask my T. I don't know if it's because of volume or frequency.

I hated DSP.

 

Maybe it has something to do with The level your T is and, and the sound that the crickets make.

It's great to hear you get relief even on low volume!

 

Maybe you can get maskers with cricket sounds. My t can sometimes go away w certain noises the tv makes its weird.

 

I don't think you can have T without hearing loss, as little as it may be. I personally have a 30dB dip in both ears around my T.

I don't know exactly how IIR filters work but here is a good and simple neurophysics paper on a simple electrical model for neurons (http://www.few.vu.nl/~marloes/QBM2010/Neurophysics.pdf). Combined with the chapter on cell noise in this paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2631351/ it seems like the system may be comprised of a FIR loop inside a IIR loop (but only due to continuous accidental re-excitation). I'm trying to better understand this myself because I've thought that if we can understand the circuit we might be able to promote reprogramming through stimulation. Your thoughts?

also, I think the first paper should give us insight into the temporal spacing of a click to induce a steady residual inhibition.

 

I find it interesting that ACRN would not work yet crickets do. A clicking sound is also used in ABR to stimulate the entire pathway as it's considered a sound of all frequencies.
Actually now that I think of it perhaps the whole ACRN theory is flawed since it never worked for anyone and any temporary relief relies solely on residual inhibition.

 

i wish i couldo the same! hahah

 

For me it's the same. Also I could accept it better if I knew the cause.
Another -maybe simpler- analogy is a resonance in a microphone-amplifier feedback loop. Everybody experienced it on public events: With no input these systems can create awful loud sounds and it only happens if background noise is going down. (Or mic comes to close to the amp).

So feedback loop must be it.
Either in the brain or ear. BTW the outer hair cells provide a feedback mechanism by vibrating. Could they be the culprit?
If the masking stimulus works on both ears like jastreboff said, it can't be the hair cells and must happen in a brain feedback loop. I will check that later when I'm in silence and have earphones...

Concerning hearing loss...I'm not sure is it a necessity for T? Is it maybe another effect of an deeper root cause, like OHC resonance catastrophe?

 

I am now considering to get maskers with cicadas sound but in Turkey we do not have many good audiologists. Once I tried maskers and they said to me that they have maskers only with ocean sound and they want 2k$ for just one pair of it. Like wtf? Do you think can I add new sound to a masker?

I think we all T sufferers should move to an island with full of ocean and cicadas sound and call it T-land. Would be a dream haha.

 

Yeah, it is weird. Can I ask do you have any hearing loss? My hearing test came perfect but since thise cicadas can completely mask my T I'm now sure I have some undetected hearing loss.

 

I'm on my phone so I'm sorry for the flood. I'm not really goot at forum thing.

So I have an idea. I know I have now hearing loss since cicadas can fully mask my T. So is there any hearing aid can help me? I have no hearing loss up to 8Khz, it must me up to it.

Or do you think if I can find the frequency of those cicadas and amplify it to the masker will it be as efficent as those cicadas? To hear cicadas all day long must be boring.

 

It seems that masking works mainly on my T ear, even though I hear it worse on it.
@Beste: you mentioned a T feeling in another post I think. Does disappear as well with this way of masking?

 

You can check if your T is unilateral, appling the circada sound to one ear at a time on same low volume and hear if there is a difference

 

Acutally I'm looking for that for a while already and couldn't find it. Asked around on TT as well.
It seems only option are hearing aids with Bluetooth what is over sophisticated in my case.

 

Hmm, for me it only works well with this one cicada sound from an app 'nature sounds hd'
To me it's kind of a miracle because nothing else is comparable. E.g. white noise makes my T rather worse.

Did you try to use studio (or at least good) speakers with a tone generator for RI? Could you match your frequency? For me its quite hard to match my T frequency but somewhere around 11khz to 15khz RI seems to work for me. But I prefer the cicadas over pure tones of course. Slightly....

 

@Beste according to ENT i dont have hearing loss my test results were perfect. My T started on left ear then moved to both ears same sound abd same frequency. I personally think i have hearing loss because i can barely understand the tv i need captions on, but then again my ears are horrible after i developed MEM so im sure that plays a big factor.

 

Oh so sorry to hear that. My T was also only one ear then switched too other and now it is in both ears and head. I have no doubt we have some hearing loss. Hmm. I'm really wondering now if stem cell therapy will work fir us then

 

I can't really match my frequency, it is very high pitched, but I know I have hearing loss in the very high frequency range, the loss is worse on the left side which is where the T is also worse, which is also the side that got blasted in my acoustic trauma, hmm.

It almost seems my T is a broadband of ultra high frequencies that's melded into one tone. More of a hissing than a single tone. Also, when I did a high frequency hearing test, the frequencies in the 14+ kHz range sounded very distorted. It's hard to explain what it even sounded like, it was more of a sensation in my left ear than a tone. I'm fairly certain I have nerve damage.

Do most people with tinnitus experience residual inhibition? I thought I was being trolled when people say skull thumping makes their tinnitus go away for a few seconds.

 

I have an update to my situation. I have not eaten much today and I'm now almost 6 hours T free! My right ear is completely silent. Left ear(the worse one) is all but just a mouse scream. Wow. This is very very new for me. I'm now the quitest room in my house but no head tinnitus! What is going on? I'm the happiest!

 

You and I got T almost at the same time. I have found the crickets worked for me too. Maybe because it is taking our mind of it it makes the volume go down. I've been finding mine T has gotten a bit lower but I'm still not 100% sure if that's from the low dose klonopin.

 

OP, if you really do completely recover from this, do NOT just go back to your normal life.

You got a taste of what it's like to be alive but not actually get to LIVE it.

This is the reality of many members of this forum. They may be alive, but they can't LIVE. You know what that means, right?

So. Since you got the chance to see what that's truly like but now get to break out of it, you owe the world a huge gigantic fucking favor. Whatever great mission you wanted to accomplish, but were too afraid to do, you HAVE to do it now.

YOU HAVE TO.

Because if you didn't, it would be the greatest injustice in the history of humanity.

Use your new found power and change the world. Given what you've been through, anything less, at this point, would be a HUGE disappointment.