Phantom Jazz Chords Playing in My Ears

I listened to a video at an average volume showing some jazz chord progressions.

I was horrified to discover that they're still faintly playing in my ears 30 minutes afterwards.

It's not like an earworm though. It definitely has the same sensation that tinnitus has.

How is this sort of thing even possible? Feeling hopeless.

 

When falling asleep, like last night, I will get a very loud explosion sound. Last night it sounded like a very high quality synthesizer sound that would have been in a NES game. It always startles me greatly.

 

I know there is Musical Ear Syndrome, but yours doesn't sound like that.

I had the above on 2 occassions. It was like far off music playing, and only lasted a few seconds.

 

Happened to me when I was listening to crickets at night. Suddenly got stuck in my head and had to wait 3-4 days for it to disappear. Be patient and it will go away.

 

Weird thing. It could be more refined and elegant if my tinnitus sounded like Vivaldi's Winter.

 

I’m sure you’ve looked into exploding head syndrome? I had this early on post-tinnitus-inducing car accident. It turned the two tones I normally hear into a cacophony. This has been mostly resolved with sleep medication that knocks me out before my brain has a chance to extrapolate on the shit it wants me to hear (250mg quetiapine, 15mg mirtazapine). If it takes you a long time to get to sleep this may be the culprit, not that I’m suggesting this medication unless you truly cannot sleep.

Is your Vyvanse no longer effective in controlling your reactions to the tinnitus?

 

I had the same on different occasions. Classical concert still in my ears after a car ride, ambulance sound. It always took at most a few hours and then faded away and left me with my normal T. Still quite bothersome. This seems also to be a very rare condition. But I think I have also read from others here on TT who suffer from this "echo hearing".

 

This is actually quite common, and isn't related to tinnitus at all. Sometimes people hear someone yell their name, or an explosion type sound. I've experienced both. It happens in the hypnogognic state where you are transitioning from awake to asleep. I actually had this happen once when I was put under anesthesia for surgery.

 

I just wandered over to my cheap glockenspiel to strike a few notes with my fingernails to check the pitch of a humming that I have going on, and my brain played it back a couple times... not as a memory, but I could hear it. A hallucination. Also, yesterday, I briefly plugged in a device that was picking up a hum, and that exact hum got stuck in my auditory system too. If what you're saying is correct, I need to keep working on correcting my sleep.

 

I also have been hearing people singing and playing wild guitar solos in white noise, like fans... I shut off the fan to hear what's playing, and it goes away.

 

Experiment: I went back to the glockenspiel and played a significantly longer melody to see if the brain would "record" it. It seems to have retained part of it but not the whole thing.

 

The parts of the brain that turn percepts into perceptions into "things" are vast and complex, and that's what we're playing with here.

When we have tinnitus, our audio system is damaged in some way, so we may encounter more weird bullshit at the periphery of our experience, than people who do not have this damage.

The craziest account I've read was in an Oliver Sacks book, of a career musician who developed a form of musical tinnitus where his moods and thinking were accompanied by a full orchestra he could "hear". This caused him great trouble, not least when he was trying to play music as part of an orchestra, and there was his brain playing its own loud music in a different tempo and key...

 

By this same token, I would suggest that the system is only partially damaged, and that some component of it is still doing what it is supposed to be doing to fill in gaps; it's just not supposed to be relied on to fill in five-to-ten-second gaps with entire musical phrases, but rather tiny gaps in say, a tone sweep or other continuous sound.

When I was early into this thing, and not as hallucinatory as I am now, I was testing my ears with a pitch sweep. When it swept upward, the tone sounded like it was naturally fading off as it went above the top of my range. But when it swept downward, you could hear it switch on abruptly as it came back into my range. So, perfect example of predictive fill-in. It's an ability our brains have for a reason, and it's just being over-taxed.

And I have no doubt there were many other fill-ins over the course of the sweep.