Sound Therapy (Notched, Full Spectrum, Matching Tinnitus) Questions

Hello,

I've been looking into sound therapy into possibly reducing tinnitus volume. A lot of research has been done proving notched sound/music efficacy but in my opinion most of results are anecdotal and lack detail (how long the person had tinnitus? what caused it? was it a double-blind study? etc.). My suspicion is that in most cases tinnitus improved as the time went on, which happens without any treatment. With that being said...

It's easy to create tracks using Audacity. Treatment, to my understanding, needs to be continuous for periods of months. And it needs to be done in silence. So if I'm going to be listening to notched sounds/music then I need to make sure there are no background sounds filling in the frequency gaps otherwise it would be relatively inefficient. This is quite hard to do in the world we live in nowadays.

With that being said notched sound/music seems to be the new hot thing out there. But if I use sounds/tone in tinnitus frequency shouldn't that also be effective? Given that we know of residual inhibition and it does work for me and probably for most people so capitalizing on it only make sense. E.g. if tinnitus is 1700Hz create a 1700Hz tone that would play every minute for a couple of seconds. I've started doing that but it's been a week or so without any noticeable results.

Also, shouldn't full frequency sounds/music be effective? If certain hair cells already died then obviously exciting live ones should also retrain the auditory cortex/brain to avoid ramping up sounds we can longer hear.

With all of the above my main concern is exposing the ears to non-stop sound which might make things worse eventually even at low volumes which is what is being recommended generally. So I'm a bit wary...

Please share your experiences and what may have helped you! Thanks!

 

Sound Therapy for desensitization can be good option especially for early onset of Tinnitus. Audacity is a good option IF after creating and identifying your specific Tsound to be added, someone else does the processing/mixing for you as the idea is to forget tinnitus and desensitize, else a cumbersome DIY process is not likely to be very helpful. Time management becomes challenging to create enough tracks daily(to adjust Tsound) to keep from getting board by the same tracks.

BeyondTinnitus.com is easier than audacity but not by much as the process can be just as frustrating and is NOT free or cheap. The money back guarantee requirements for refund are too restrictive to have any value.

"Notch" therapy has become popular as it is an easy app to program unfortunately it is Scientifically and Clinically BOGUS!

Other Android and IOS sound therapy apps are so poorly designed they are impossible to use.

Advance DIY masking techniques are usually most helpful for distraction. or try the many soundscape type tracks on Pandora.

There is a suite of Tinnitus tools that I found on google patents created filed in 2011/2015 that seems most thoughtful. It allows the user to create and adjust the Tsound and mix/process with music, speech and ambient sound tracks REAL TIME that was not commercially viable in 2011 but the devices today should make it easy.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9067044B2/en
There is nothing commercially available that even compares. It would be great if it was developed.

 

Where did you hear that notched sound therapy is scientifically bogus?