Weird New Phenomenon

Starting about 2 weeks ago, I've been getting a wavering, intermittent tone that varies around ~2000 hz in my left ear only. But here's the strange thing: the tone only appears in tandem with certain environmental sounds. That is to say – if I'm in perfect silence, I don’t hear the new tone at all. But when I hear certain types of sounds, like white noise or crinkling plastic, the tone will appear and it will match the external sound for volume. If the external sound stops, the phantom tone will stop immediately. Think of it as reactive tinnitus, except the reaction time offset is zero, and the correlation by volume is 1:1.

As always with me, the emergence of this new auditory phenomenon follows closely after a short period of dull facial pain. I took a Medrol pack but it does not seem to have helped.

I've searched this board and others but I can’t find anyone else who describes anything quite like this. Does this phenomenon sound familiar to anyone?

 

It sounds like reactive tinnitus so your tinnitus is reacting to what you hear...lo00ts of love glynis

 

Sound reactive tinnitus or diplacusis.

 

But it completely lacks the “kindling” and “winding up” effects which are inclusive in the definition of “reactive tinnitus.” I'm having trouble putting what I'm experiencing into words, but it’s more accurate to describe it as a “feedback effect” that responds to certain types of sounds. If I run the sink, my left ear will play a whistle-like tone that wavers in both volume and pitch. The very millisecond I stop the water, the tone will stop immediately.

Is there a name for that? I've never heard anyone describe reactive tinnitus like that before. Really the only thing “tinnitus-like” about it is that it sounds tonal and high pitched.

The only theory I can come up with is that my brain is overactively “pulling down” certain frequencies from the real sounds I hear.

I'm not feeling any pain, sense of loudness, or other symptoms of hyperacusis in that ear, nor I'm I noticing any signs associated with tensor tympani contraction. (Although I've experienced all of those symptoms many months ago in that ear.)

I found this thread from 2 years ago where the poster describes something very similar to what I'm experiencing. For him, the trigger is talking, but for me, the trigger is white noise. Unfortunately, that seems to be the last time he ever signed in:

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/feedback-ringing-when-talking.4841/

 

I've had similar things to this, but for me it was high frequencies only, so I wouldn't hear it so much day to day, but music, or metallic sounds would have an instant echo. This tends not to occur so much anymore, but lasted a long time.

 

I have the same thing but there are certain frequency ranges that set it off. About 3 very common ones, one is very low like 2khz, and it just sounds like resonance. Makes music sound bad.