Sound Engineering When the (Low Frequency) Tinnitus Is the Hyperacusis

So in recent years I found out there are many many different types of hyperacusis. Many more than the ones described by the establishment of sound therapists because they're like a royal family of inbreds. There are some, fewer than I thought though, like me, who feel vibrations in the ear. And then there are others that feel no vibration at all, no issues with quiet sounds whatsoever, but instead feel massive pangs of pain in their ear, in their head or anywhere.

The thing is, in my etiology, I have a high pitched and low pitched tinnitus (And so did David Letterman by the way, at least in the 90s, but he didn't complain further and certainly wasn't as brutally impaired as I am). Before my second acoustic trauma that made my low frequency tinnitus permanent and my high frequency tinnitus louder, the low frequency T would only turn on in the presence of external sound. Now my tinnitus still follows external sound about, with a huge emphasiss on signal over noise, but it follows noise about too. But now it's an extreme case of this type of hyperacusis, as it jostles and vibrates with the slightest of ever so slightest of external provocation.

Now in silence, the low frequency tinnitus is pretty strong, it can be felt in the ears, as if they're vibrating permanently. I still don't understand it, but I tried to look at this from a sound engineer's perspective, to see if the tinnitus could be combining with the external sound. And apparently there are concepts that might or might not be at play here.

Concepts like sympathetic vibration, where certain things make others vibrate by proximity, causing resonance. The thing is, I don't understand why resonance would emphasize so strongly on the signal and return to an increased but static baseline when exposed to background noise, as in my understanding resonance would be more evened throughout the entirety of the noise exposure. But maybe the tinnitus is a broken amp that's oscillating, maybe the resonant frequency of the materials is changed by the presence of this baseline tinnitus. Maybe frequency resonance is occurring, because all of my ''hyperacusis'' is really me being attacked by low vibration explosions. There's not a single instance of my hyperacusis not really in fact being accompanied by this veneer of vibratory sound. So just like my high pitched tinnitus is slightly stronger in the presence of sound, you'd have to assume that the low frequency vibration, which is felt a lot more in the ears than it's heard, even in silence, is doing the same thing. Maybe the frequencies of the external sound are combining with my low frequency tinnitus, forming new frequencies, and indeed that's what sound feels like. Maybe stuff like sound mass, system instability, steady-state resonance, transients or spring reverbs are going on here, who knows, I'm certainly no sound engineer, nor am I a physicist. And the audiologists don't seem to be either, they look like a herd of button-punching monkeys.

It's a telling sign of the shit research out there at medical quarterlies that there is no official description for this type of combination between hyperacusis and tinnitus. In fact it often gets mixed up with ''reactive tinnitus'', which was also a term that was denied by the sound therapist gang and their pravdas, and refers more often to folks who have pain after sound. And it gets mixed up with ''somatic tinnitus'' which only explains part of my etiology, the part where you move your neck and it increases, that's me, but somatic tinnitus goes on to describe a bunch of other things that are related but quite different, like looking for a cause in TMJ instead of saying acoustic shock can cause TMJ issues, or like isolating all forms of somatic tinnitus to the outside of the ear, whereas I'm saying somatic tinnitus could be occurring inside the ear or its whereabouts.

There are others that have my type of startle hyperacusis, with or without vibrations, and with or without a basic tinnitus backing it up. It's possible, though not confirmed, that their type of H isn't as extreme as mine, and maybe they would need my base vibration to reach my level of hyperacusis, maybe they wouldn't. On facebook, some guy got cured from my type of hyperacusis or close to its extremism, by reinforcing the eardrum, dripping a type of anesthetic down his eustachian tube and lidocaine shots on the trigeminal, but he didn't have tinnitus. He also got it from an operation to extract a cyst from the eustachian tube. Many of Silverstein patients have trouble with sudden sounds, but up to now we've only seen them manifest it as pain or vibrations in the body, not as vibrations in the ear. Plus, many of them got cured of their H but not of their T, while in my case T and H are intimately almost mathematically linked, making me even less likely to try his procedure.

I posted a link to a doctor that 20 years ago was blaming dioxides in the middle ear for low frequency tinnitus. While he says at one point external sound doesn't make it increase because it's not linked to the cochlea, which would make it not my type of T and H, he is also saying the ear is no longer an isolated compartment thanks to the laws of sound conductivity that are unchained because ''the walls of the cavity are abnormally in contact with another wall, connected to the rest of the body'', maybe he's saying that a noise gate, as sound engineers call it, is broken. I actually can't remember if back when I had a slighter case, I qualified for more of his criteria, like swallowing and shaking your head causing reductions in the hum, but it's possible. Plus, back then, trimetazidine would give a temporary reduction to the tinnitus, a drug that has since been taken off the market as it's considered dangerous, but was used for heart attack patients, maybe relevant here as he talks of capillaries and blood flow. His explanation isn't quite the same thing then, in fact it's possibly very different, but it's a variation on the theme. Someone in Germany was cured from my type of sudden vibration with sound H, with injections of VOX down the eustachian tube by a doctor saying this was a patulous tube symptom, leaving the statements of the french doctor made 20 years ago at the frontier between the eustachian tube and the cochlea.

 

Hi @japongus . I'm so sorry for what you're going through, and many of us can identify with it. I too have constant high pitched T and (since 2014) low frequency T that makes my head vibrate. There's a long thread of fellow sufferers at https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/low-frequency-tinnitus.5522/ that I invite you to read through. Maybe you'll find something helpful.

Best of luck,
Della