What's Your Definition of Mild Tinnitus?

Yep, atrocious. My official reason for admittance was “depression and anxiety”—fuck all the way off people, I’m smarter than you.

 

Hi,can I ask what motorcycle do you ride and which helmet do you use and what speed were you driving?
If you were riding with custom earplugs and a full helmet at a speed no more than 120 km/h the wind noise would be around 95 max 100 dB's so with good earplugs you should be ok normally.
I am asking this because I also still ride my motorcycle and did a few tests with my dB meter under my helmet and came up with these results.
I also use custom earplugs and a shoei full helmet and ride a naked bike.

 

I noticed you also tested the Cat-Ears with a dB meter. Were they safe?

With my current anxiety I honestly can't tell what's too loud and what isn't. Is the wind noise riding a road bike comparable in any way with a motorbike? I don't have a motorbike so I would like to hear your experience on this. I always thought the full-face helmet would somewhat mitigate the wind noise even if you ride faster. I feel like the Cat-Ears cut out the highs effectively but not the lows (like a rumble) and I don't know how damaging it is. I'm also considering switching to a Smith Podium Time trial helmet that covers the ears. Not sure it would help...

 

The wind noise on a motorbike is way louder than on a road bike, on the road bike the cat ears help immensely and reduce the wind noise to max 70 -75 decibels on my top speed which is around 40 km/h since I am not a pro so no need to worry there. Now that its winter I wear a beanie under my helmet and it's even more quiet. I sometimes wear portable speakers around my neck to listen to some music and I can hear the music perfectly even on very low volume.
On the motorbike I got higher readings, especially riding faster than 110 km/h so you definitely need ear plugs and a full helmet and a quality scarf to narrow the wind inlet between your neck and helmet.

 

I don't ride a motorbike. I just wondered if I should trust the Cat-Ears. In crosswinds and on high wind days they seem less effective. When I do some A/B testing they help a lot, no doubt. It's just not the "two fingers either side of your head" reduction I was hoping for. I feel like I can't relax and it sucks the enjoyment out of cycling for the moment. I think I might try some time trial helmets next (there are a couple of shorter versions without a "tail".

 

Well I guess under these definitions I have severe tinnitus. Do I get a prize? Except on my rare 'quiet moment' maybe a couple of hours total since its onset, I hear it always. I hear it clearly over busy city traffic, loud TV, super distracting on my motorcycle, bike you name it. To be fair if I let myself kind of space out on the shower and not think about it I might not notice it. Never get a moment when it is not there ringing away in my head. I try to be strong not let it get to me. There are times when I forget to notice it which is a relief and of course there are still times where I allow myself fall into self pity (last night was one of them...sigh). It is the later which is the only time I really get in a bad way. Oddly I've never used any masking for sleep. It would seem crazy to try. I just go to sleep to the screeching....I mean the gentle chimes and crickets and crackles in my head.

All that being said my THI has probably dropped from the 70's to the 30's over the last couple of months so at least I am learning to cope. I aspire to the day that I could put on the radio or TV and not hear my head.

I am blessed to not have issues with anxiety or depression so it makes it easier to deal with. Still it super sucks and impacts aspects of concentration, hearing and patience. I use a good bit of my available will power to keep everything cool inside.

 

I ride a Suzuki 1000 GSXR and wear a Shoei GT-Air 2.

I agree with your analysis but unfortunately we are not all made equal... our genetic make up and our noise exposure history accounts for a great deal. I know people who have tinnitus and ride Harley Davidsons with open face helmets and have never had an increase in tinnitus... on the other side of the spectrum I have heard of a tinnitus sufferer who had a spike after riding a scooter...

 

I totally understand, I used to have the same anxiety about thinking everything wil be too loud, luckily this faded after a year and half with this condition, now I don't even think about the loudness anymore when riding my road bike or mountainbike because it will not damage your ears more unless you are riding harder as 40 km/h and even than every pro cyclist would have hearing damage and/or tinnitus.
You can check my posts with my dB meter with and without the cat ears.
Side wind will never harm your ears as it isn't that loud unless you are riding in a storm.
I do a lot Kitesurfing as well in very hard wind and I just wear a neopreen beanie over my ears and never had a spike from the wind even when it was blowing 80 km/h and my tinnitus can be very loud as in "hear it over everything" loud.

 

Going through your posts I noticed we're both Belgians. To keep it relevant for the others I'll continue in English though. Have you measured inside the ear? I wonder if the form of my ears and ear canal have something to do with the frequencies I perceive. A Buff worn around the head doesn't make much of a difference even though I feel it flattens my ears somewhat against my head. I feel that with the Cat-Ears I hear cars coming from behind, and the rustle of wind in the trees and the Buzz of my tyres on the road. So it seems like they work, but at the same time at the lower end of the frequency spectrum there's this low warble that seems loud. I think it must be around 30Hz or so. Very fluttering and irregular. My tinnitus is high pitched.

I don't know if a low sound can damage the higher frequencies as well? If that's not a possibility I would already be more relaxed. I bike to work, and I would hate to have to let that slip. I had tinnitus for over a decade. I was using earplugs for bikings some 8 years ago and then sort of recovered enough mentally and I didn't use them anymore. I never felt like wind noise was too much of an issue.

Nowadays after a worsening from an explosion in February the wind noise can never be quiet enough for my liking.

I hope I can recover again and learn not to fear sounds that aren't dangerously loud.

 

Yes I measured right beside the ear canal, I put the mic from the headphones with tape against my ear and measured it with the iOS dB pro app.

It will not be 100 percent correct but if I compare it to official tests done in a wind tunnel it comes pretty close.

Since you are Belgian as well we can hopefully try Lenire soon.

I was thinking you were new to tinnitus, sorry about that, most have been a very loud firecracker no?

Hope you feel better soon, you can always send me a message, I'm from the Flemish part.

 

Yes you are totally right and I met others before that always have spikes after a ride, my tinnitus was probably caused by riding my motorcycle without plugs, I had really no idea the wind noise was so damaging for my ears.
None of my friends who ride motorcycle ever use plugs, I found out about the wind noise through a YouTube video.
My father has tinnitus for 20 years and rides his bike with open helmet and no plugs.
I hope you will feel better soon.

 

I would like to re-emphasise that tinnitus affects all of us in different ways and the manner in which it reacts is also very different in each individual.

I will give you an example of a famous tinnitus sufferer who has never stopped riding and continues to do so on various motorcycles with various helmets... It does not appear to have affected/worsened his condition... this person is Keanu Reeves, both his condition and his passion for motorcycle riding are well documented...

https://riderswestmag.com/rideon/article/keanu_reeves_and_his_love_of_motorcycles

Keanu Reeves and Arch Motorcycle Co. -- /GOING...

https://quiet-ears.com/theyre-just-like-us-celebrities-with-tinnitus-and-how-they-cope/

Following my recent setback I was told, by an audiologist, that wearing earplugs on a motorcycle might not have been a good idea due to the "occlusion" effect... and that this in fact could have caused the flare up...your dad might be doing the right thing...

Over the last decade I have heard so many different things and have been given diverging advice on the matter... bottom line I don't think anybody really truly understands this disorder...

Thanks for your kind wishes.

Wishing you all the best and stay safe.

 

I'm definitely thinking of going down that route. The firecracker was indoors. I wasn't right next to it but I guess that's all it took. Suffered no obvious and measurable hearing loss from it though. You would think it would at least have muffled my hearing a bit but no...
Something that's also possible is that it's just crept up over the year and the stress and anxiety from the explosion just dehabituated me. It doesn't matter. What matters is that it now bothers me a lot during the day and that sucks...

 

Thanks, me too.

 

I'm not an expert but as far as I know occlusion effect can occur when you speak with plugs in and your speech is in certain lower frequencies amplified, I can't imagine this being the case on your motorcycle unless you were shouting the whole trip.
I only once had a feeling of loud vibration in my ears and this was when a bus pulled up right next to me while I was standing still between the bus and a wall with my motor. Very strange...

 

Can't the lower frequency sound waves make it easier past the earplugs in the same way that these frequencies carry further through water, air and solid structures such as bone and the earplug material? Then the sound gets trapped between the eardrum and the plug and is amplified? Not an expert but is it possible? And would the lower frequencies be harmful to the hearing? If so, why is most hearing loss and tinnitus in the higher frequencies apart from Menière's? I'm raising more questions then I'm answering.

 

Maybe @linearb can help to answer these questions....

 

How old are you? Do you have any hearing loss that shows up on an audiogram?

I am just curious. My tinnitus is multi toned and loud with rare minor fluctuation. I have had minor "improvement" when the fluctuation went from 10/10 severity to 8/10 and the tones seemed to be only two, three or maybe one - it was difficult to tell - it was either one or they are so blended together.

However, at the moment, various tones are distinguishable and that makes it worse. I don't have chimes or other sounds - or at least, these seem like several different individual tones together. If the volume was lower and it was just one tone and wasn't so abrasive ringing, then maybe (I think) I could deal with it.

But, this to me? Isn't moderate or mild tinnitus. I consider severe tinnitus to be ringing tones that can't be masked and there's only rare minor fluctuation - as major fluctuations as long as they are positive especially reductions of tinnitus tones and volume are key to coping, imho.

 

Depends.

Are you getting your mild tinnitus from an authentic Mexican restaurant or mild tinnitus from Taco Bell?

Taco Bell mild tinnitus is not really mild at all.

 

I was not saying that my flare up was due to the "occlusion effect".

My point was that even the so called "experts" cannot agree and consistently have diverging views... at this stage I still don't really know what caused this flare up.

 

For me, mild was when I could hear my tinnitus over sounds like the TV but not louder environmental sounds such as traffic. When I first acquired tinnitus around the year 2000, it was something I could hear if I paid attention to it, but only in certain environments. In quiet rooms it was always fairly loud from what I remember. To me personally, this level of tinnitus caused me no problems at all. It took me probably a few months to start ignoring it and then I forgot about it until the year 2015 when it became very loud and prominent in my brain 24/7. It also became more layered with various sounds going on.

The problem I have with the 1-10 scale is that we have no idea what someone’s idea of a 1 or a 6 is, for example. My previous mild tinnitus may have been a 6 or 7 on somebody else’s scale. I have no idea. My current tinnitus could just as easily be a 5 or something on somebody else’s scale. This is what makes the loudness thing a bit of a misnomer.

We should always measure the level of suffering above all else.

 

There’s less risk associated with lower frequency sounds causing damage, but that risk isn’t eliminated. There are rare reported cases of infrasound causing people problems, but this is usually with those who work around certain air conditioners all day, for example. You can look this up on google.

We hear because the frequencies involved in a broadband sound directly resonate with the hair cells inside our cochlea at specific pitches. This is from circa 20 Hz to 20 kHz. All objects on earth have a resonant frequency at which they will vibrate when exposed to their resonant pitch. There are various representations of this such as playing a G note on a guitar and hearing a door or other object rattle, for example.

Our pinnas collect sound in a specific way; they guide certain frequencies into our ear canal which then hits our eardrums causing the sound to travel mechanically towards the cochlea via the ossicles. The sound will resonate certain hair cells but not others depending upon which frequencies are present in the broadband sound one is being exposed to. These vibrations are then electrically converted into sound as they travel up the auditory nerve and into the brain. This is where a significant amount of processing takes place which involves other parts of the brain such as the hippocampus and amygdala. The analysis of the sound is based upon previous experiences (memories) and if danger is interpreted, your body will go into fight or flight, for example, but if you hear your wedding song or something you associate with a happy memory, then you may have a rush of endorphins and feel happy, depending on the context. There’s a huge amount of complexity involved in hearing a sound and how it is interpreted. This is the domain of psychoacoustics.

Getting back to low frequencies: anything lower than 20 Hz can’t be heard by a human ear which means there are no hair cells that will be resonated by those particular sounds. This is why we have the HL (hearing level) standard in audiometry, and the A-weighted decibel scale for measuring pressure waves, as they are tailored to the human ear.

Very low frequencies will just pass right through your entire body, brick walls, and other large objects as they are so long in wavelength. They can’t be heard because they aren’t resonating your cells, but some of them can be felt. The reason people consider lower frequencies (that can’t be heard) as less dangerous is because of the lack of activation of the signal process directly at the ear itself. These waves still carry energy though, and if loud enough, then damage is a possibility. However, when sound is this low it could also damage your internal organs. It would have to be hideously loud, though. This is what makes rocket launches so interesting. A lot of thought has to go into the location of such things as the low frequency sound waves can literally demolish buildings within a given range. They can also kill a person which is why you have to stay at least 3-4 miles away.

Higher frequency sounds are generally much riskier when it comes to your average noise exposure scenario. Firstly because your pinnas actually guide these frequencies into your ear canal, and secondly, there are more hair cells that may violently resonant if the sounds are loud. This can cause free radical damage and oxidative death. This is why people take NAC on this site. The theory is that the antioxidants fight the free radical damage in your inner ear when exposed to noise.

 

What range would the "Pseudosound" of wind noise fall in? After all, it's some sort of perception of sound caused by turbulence of the wind accelerating around an object, rather than a real sound. We know it can be damaging for cyclists and motorcyclists. If you were to protect yourself with Cat-Ears or earplugs, would the low frequencies carry enough energy to be harmful?

 

A quick google brings up this reference:

It is inferred that the effect of wind speed is dominant in the frequency band of 22 Hz to 5 kHz by experimenting at 40 different locations [5]. Further high frequency noise is said to be highly correlated to wind speed from 4–15 m/sec. The optimal frequency range for estimating wind is from 2–6 kHz [6].

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijocean/2011/950838/

And also, this is kind of interesting relating to infrasound:

Scientific consensus suggests it does not. Twenty-five peer-reviewed studies have found that living near wind turbines does not pose a risk on human health. The studies looked at a range of health effects from hearing loss, nausea, and sleep disorders to dizziness, blood pressure, tinnitus, and more. Recently, a new study using retrospective data reported that stress, as measured by hair cortisol levels, was not associated with proximity to wind turbines.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/can-wind-turbines-make-you-sick/

 

Thanks Ed. From my experience with the Cat-Ears either side of my helmet straps it only lets the lows through (a warbling growling sound). The fuzzy design is to break up the turbulence . There is definitely almost no noise at the mid and higher frequencies. There seems to be some confusion in how lower frequencies damage hearing. Some say they pass the higher frequency receptors on their way to the base of the cochlea and can as such inflict damage in the high frequencies and exacerbate high pitch tinnitus. Others say that only the hair cells that are designed to pick up the sound will resonate and move and thus are at risk of getting damaged...
Do you have any knowledge on this Ed?

That is not exactly how low of a sound I meant. People claiming inaudible sound effects their wellbeing are probably just looking for ways to get wind turbines out of their backyard. Green energy is all well and good but NIMBY. In my opinion, if you can't hear it it can't harm you. Adults who cannot perceive that mosquito tone also won't be affected.

 

I have to state that I’m not an expert on this. I only know what I’ve read, but I do read a lot of scientific literature and I subscribe to New Scientist. I have a knowledge of sound, and the basic physics of it, because I’m a trained sound engineer. There are no pseudosounds. Sound is just the vibration of air molecules moving as a wave, and it only exists as an interpretation (a realised sound) because of our brain. It reminds me of the old Chinese proverb of, “If a tree falls in the woods, but nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?

The way I see it regarding damage is this: if the wavelength(s) are within the range to vibrate some of your hair cells, then the risk is high if the amplitude is high. Sound that’s out of range on either end of the spectrum will not directly affect the receptors, which means the risk of oxidative stress is highly unlikely. However, there are cases of people reporting “problems” from infrasound like I said a few posts ago. A couple of years ago a read quite a lot on this subject.

I think the main issue is that most people can’t hear frequencies below circa 250 Hz even though our ears have receptors down to 20 Hz. This means there are instances where one could expose themselves to dangerous levels of noise without even realising it.

Here’s an excerpt on this issue that may be of interest:

For the new study, neurobiologist Markus Drexl and colleagues at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, asked 21 volunteers with normal hearing to sit inside soundproof booths and then played a 30-Hz sound for 90 seconds. The deep, vibrating noise, Drexl says, is about what you might hear “if you open your car windows while you’re driving fast down a highway.” Then, they used probes to record the natural activity of the ear after the noise ended, taking advantage of a phenomenon dubbed spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs) in which the healthy human ear itself emits faint whistling sounds. “Usually they’re too faint to be heard, but with a microphone that’s more sensitive than the human ear, we can detect them,” Drexl says. Researchers know that SOAEs change when a person’s hearing changes and disappear in conjunction with hearing loss.

People's SOAEs are normally stable over short time periods. But in the study, after 90 seconds of the low-frequency sound, participants’ SOAEs started oscillating, becoming alternately stronger and weaker. The fluctuations lasted about 3 minutes, the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science. The changes aren’t directly indicative of hearing loss, but they do mean that the ear may be temporarily more prone to damage after being exposed to low-frequency sounds, Drexl explains. “Even though we haven’t shown it yet, there’s a definite possibility that if you’re exposed to low-frequency sounds for a longer time, it might have a permanent effect,” Drexl adds.

“The unfortunate thing about our ears is that we can be doing terrible things to them with sounds that aren’t necessarily painful,” says hearing loss researcher M. Charles Liberman of Harvard Medical School in Boston. To explore the potential harm of specific sounds, such as the hotly debated question of the effect of wind turbines on hearing, Liberman says the same experiment could be repeated with conditions mimicking wind turbine noise. He’d also like to see the study expanded to look at how the ears react to noises—rather than silence—in the minutes after low-frequency sound exposure.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/sounds-you-cant-hear-can-still-hurt-your-ears

This is technically not true if you read above. Although, in principle you are right. It’s just that the lowest sounds we are capable of hearing are not always “heard.”

This will give you an idea of the SPL required for a sound to be heard by the average normal hearing person.

 

@Ed209 Do you think sound that falls within the audible range can affect the other end of the hearing spectrum? For example can a bass sound kill off stereocilia responsible for hearing high pitched sounds and cause hearing loss in the high frequency range?

I have to be somewhat proactive about this and while the above research suggests that there's far more to it than we can grasp, I have to find a way to move on and establish a good practice concerning my wind noise exposure on the bike without it sending me into a hypervigilant state and stressing all the time. I don't mean I need anyone to tell me what I need to hear, but at some point I hope to be at ease again while riding.

If I knew for sure that lower sounds in the worst case scenario would result in low frequency hearing loss and accompanying low pitch tinnitus then I would take that chance while obviously taking some precautions and adopting a low-risk approach. (Knowing that there are cyclists doing way more miles for way more years being unaffected)

The very last thing I want is making my high pitch tinnitus worse, but I have to find some ways to tackle a couple of issues and get back to living and worrying less. Because I'm commuting 6 hrs per week total this particular problem is probably the biggest hurdle on my road to recovery.

 

As far as I’m aware it seems doubtful. We only hear certain sounds (frequencies) because of the direct activation of the corresponding hair cells that give the illusion of that frequency as a sound via our brain. Meaning, the higher frequency hair cells in such instances would remain fairly dormant. If they were activated enough to be damaging you’d certainly “hear” it as a high frequency. That is of course unless you have upper frequency losses at the pitches you’re being exposed to. The only way I can see that happening is if the fundamental tone (being low pitched in this case) had upper harmonic overtones present that were not as obvious and were maybe masked by the fundamental.

 

Thanks,

I don't think there would be an overtone so loud it would be damaging. I can definitely still hear high pitch sounds as birdsong and the splash of car tyres on rainy tarmac and wind rustling in the leaves together with the wind rumble, only the latter being louder and low. So it's sort of a situation where I perceive other sounds relatively well.

Am I correct in assuming there couldn't be any loud upper harmonics as they wouldn't allow me to hear higher frequency sounds?

 

whether or not this is actually true, you're gonna have a very, very hard time getting satisfaction out of the medical establishment if you wear it on your sleeve, because doctors, just like every other profession, are disinclined to be as helpful as possible to customers who act condescending and aggressive.

If you are actually smarter than the medical providers you're working with -- simply play along enough to manipulate them into accomplishing whatever treatment or end goal you desire. If you're not capable of doing that, well, maybe someone who's studied something exhaustively for a decade does in fact know some stuff you don't?