I really wish someone was working to solve the problem of tinnitus. Would it be possible to generate anti phase wave out of these things to cancel out tinnitus? I would pay anything and/or wear any goofy device in my ears to live life tinnitus free.
An interesting side note is that you could 'hear' a very high pitched sound when using the device even though 50kHz is far outside the standard human hearing range. We still are not sure but think we were hearing a lower harmonic of the tone bouncing around the skull.
edit: is this your project? http://www.tinnitus.vcu.edu/Pages/Tinnitus%20Improvement.pdf
Sending 50kHz vibrations into the earn should interact with a 49kHz tone to cause the listener to hear a 1kHz tone.
(This is all from an acoustics course I took over a decade ago, so take it with a grain of salt!)
What worked for me was stop fighting and start loving it. Now it's a perma mantra. Some somatic malfunction that enables me to ear the hum inside of me or whatever poetry works for you. Try it maybe.
Whoa, what an interesting strategy. Here's a question for you: is your tinnitus a constant predictable pitch? If so, you could probably train a strong relative pitch skill enough to be able to spoof perfect pitch! That's pretty cool.
Thanks for the suggestion tho.
I'm hearing a tinnitus for over 10 years now, so I know what it's like. :)
That's the most perfect typo I've seen in a while.
When you play two square waves that are slightly off, you also hear a really obvious pulse that corresponds to how off they are (1 pulse per second means they're off by exactly 1 hz, and so on.) I don't know what the experience of tinnitus would be, but assuming you can hear the tinnitus and a square wave at a close pitch, it should be fairly easy to isolate the exact frequency with a binary search.
I found a frequency that was pretty close to what I hear (it's convenient that my left ear is mostly normal), and cranked it in my right ear. I now hear something like a distant swarm of bees, or a server room full of very loud fans.
I found the frequency of my tinnitus (67hz) and changed the octave until I found the best result (268hz).
No. Tinnitus is not caused by a real sound. It occurs somewhere after the phase-erasing Fourier transform performed by the physical structure of the ear. If it were caused by a real sound, or the brain added sounds in the time space (rather than the frequency space), it would work. But neurons are not fast enough to handle time-domain sound processing, so they offload Fourier transformation to the ear and then work with the (presumably phaseless) frequency-domain representation.
This is my new favorite way to describe the process. Gonna use this with my students :)
Then how is it that you can play one frequency into one ear and a slightly different frequency in the other ear, and the brain will register the beat frequency?
Only for the lowest frequencies (say, under 100 Hz) are there reliable traveling waves to even measure in the brain. Due to the firing refactory period where a neuron resets its membrane potential, most neurons have a max firing rate in the range of 250-300 Hz, so it's not possible for difference tones to explain any binaural beats above those frequencies.
Even for lower frequencies in the range of delta-gamma waves, it seems deeply unlikely that difference tones are the explanation, because the neurons encoding for frequency are separated spatially, so it's not as if two traveling waves reach the same neuron, subtract out, and result in the difference frequency.
However the brain produces the beat frequency, it's nothing like the way signals subtract in other media.
That's not where this is coming from. If, as you say, the brain is processing information in the frequency domain, then how would beat frequencies arise? I'm not debunking what you are claiming. That fits what I know about hearing. I'm genuinely curious as to how!
My primary area of study was perceptual consciousness in the visual domain, so I had to look a little more in-depth into binaural beats to answer your question. So, it appears that frequency coding is the norm for higher frequencies, but not for lower frequencies, which are the only ones we can hear binaural beats from. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find much relevant neuroimaging literature, so I don't really know.
Binaural beats are an auditory illusion, but I'm not sure of what process. The lower frequencies do record phase information, and use that for localization information (comparing phase differences at each ear for a frequency tell you the angle it came in from), so It could be related. Sorry again!
For binaural beats with low-frequency tones, I can only guess, but you can actually reconstruct phase information from the frequency domain signal depending on your sampling period. As a trivial example, imagine f << 1/T; now you can treat the DC component of the Fourier transform as a time-domain signal that contains f. I imagine that's how binaural beats work, as they occur at sufficiently low frequencies for this to happen. It could also be that the ear transmits low-frequency time domain information as well as frequency-domain information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yDCox-qKbk
It's not much and doesn't seem to work for everyone, but if you've been suffering from tinnitus for years, one minute is better than nothing.
tinnitus is caused by people listening to music that is too loud. Music is too loud at most venues, if you are standing where you are meant to.
EDIT:
people don't like this comment, and point out that in many places inserts are available. All the same, the general clubs that I go to where I live, don't have them, and, more to the point, nobody else wears them. it's a social problem and perhaps a marketing problem. many bars / clubs are too loud and I as a consumer haven't been solicited to pay for a solution on-site. (even if this exists.) others I'm with don't wear anything either.
The responses here have convinced me that I likely should invest in some and bring them with me - but I don't like that I'm the only one doing so, and it seems kind of anal. i'm just being honest about how I feel. it would be easier if they were more readily available / being sold, and if everyone were using them.
I like to be cool and do the same thing everyone else does. just being honest.
In general, if the performers are wearing them, you probably should be, too. Your health is not a good place to think about being worried about what other people aren't doing to protect theirs.
I started using them in the 90s rave scene in SF. I would go to a party and would always bring earplugs with me, extra ones and hand them out. Especially to people who appeared to have had... a little too much. Sometimes handing a plastic bag of earplugs to someone who has had too much is a great thing from them as it helps them center a bit more.
I personally think that all concert ticket windows should hand these out with each ticket purchase/pickup.
One time I got grabbed by a bunch of bouncers and forcibly expelled from the venue - they thought the purple earplugs were drugs. Once they realized they were super apologetic and we had a good laugh about it.
I got a pair for EDC after realizing the foam earplugs were ruining the music. These reduce the volume with minimal muffling. Also pretty cheap considering they'll last a long time.
I picked them up at guitar center - they can help you get the right ones.
That's how it started with my MC5's. I put a piece of heat shrink tubing over the fray in order to postpone their demise but ultimately the plastic housing of the driver itself broke. The HF5's one day just stopped working out of one ear. I was never particularly rough with them or anything and only really used them at the office, but that was it for me.
I since moved on to a pair of Sennheiser MM 550-Xs but stopped using them because there was Bluetooth interference in my office (every one of about 70 desks in an open plan has a Bluetooth phone headset). Plus, the band messed with my hair and scalp.
Now I'm on a pair of Sennheiser CX 686G SPORTS that I originally bought for running but now use at the office. Sound's good enough and the build quality is superb since it was designed to be tossed about while doing active stuff.
I would gladly go back to Etymotic if they came out with something new in the $100ish price range, but for now I'll stick with Sennheiser. I've bought probably 6 different pairs of headphones from Sennheiser of varying styles in the past decade or so, and they all still work (with varying degrees of wear and tear). The only time a pair has broken on me was because I stupidly tried putting them on after they spent a night in a below-freezing car and didn't give them time to warm up, snapping the plastic headband, and their warranty service still replaced them with no questions asked.
Went to a kids show, some disney tripe or other, volume was painful for me and made my youngest at the time cry ... movie theatres clearly have a thing about being loud but surely that doesn't help to make them a place anyone wants to be. Yes, I went out and spoke to someone and had the sound level lowered, it was still loud; I'm sure it was beyond the safe working volume set by Health & Safety Executive [UK] though. Amazed that it's not monitored and set automatically.
I find that really nice (and wish more countries would do the same).
No one is "forcing you" to have tinnitus. And what's so "ridiculous" about protecting your own hearing?
We are responsible for our own self-destructive behavior, like going to concerts without ear protection. Almost everyone's done it, but let's not blame other people for our own recklessness.
open-ended question.
Most venues will also either give you or sell you (for $1) a pair of foam earplugs at the bar. Do it.
Nobody is going to protect your ears for you.
I quote the word because I can hear even the slightest sounds like the ticking of a watch in another room in complete silence, while at the same time being overwhelmed by the ringing. I had a hearing test done a couple years ago at a neurological institute to try to diagnose other issues (migraine-related), and my hearing was higher than they could measure. So it's not damage. It's quite fascinating.
I've gone to only one concert in my lifetime, and I don't listen to loud music. I haven't been around loud equipment for any length of time.
That might be something to explore; thank you for that. I also grind my teeth aggressively at night (which I wasn't aware of until ~1y ago when my wife told me).
Perhaps that's the scene (metal, northern Europe). Most venues will sell for 1EUR, or give away, free foam plugs, but most people have better ones.
Loud noise being just the most common--and least treatable--cause.
Another cause is otosclerosis, which is preeminently treatable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otosclerosis
If you have tinnitus, don't assume that nothing can be done. See an audiologist.
Searching just now turns up http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2010/01/11/tinnitus_the_ea/ and http://www.therasmusforum.com/tinnitus-type-is-similar-to-ph...
I've tried it and it seems to work at least for a while for me. YMMV.
It also looks like more specific NMDA agonists are being developed as a treatment? http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....