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Comment by mad_tortoise | Hacker News Reader

As someone newly with tinnitus, and with fading hope that it will go away at some point, I've been playing around with ideas of doing something like this. I was thinking of using frequencies to cancel each other out, but I think this might work much better.

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I don't think that it's possible to use certain frequencies to 'cancel out' the perception of tinnitus because for the over whelming majority of folks dealing tinnitus the noise isn't a real sound.

Even an imagined sound has a frequency (and probably?) a phase.

It might be possible to generate a tone at the same frequency and shift the phase until it's 180 degrees out of phase with the imagined sound. Perhaps the brain would do the math and cancel the imagined sound?

This can't really be automated since there's no way to measure the imagined sound, but it might be possible to make a little box with knobs - pitch, phase, and volume - that would all one to tune a cancellation frequency.

I am very active in a lot of online tinnitus forums. If that worked it would have been shown to years ago because it gets tried over and over and over and over and over.

Seems like it's a common idea that gets stuck in technically oriented folks heads and they're compelled to some how force it to work.

It doesn't work.

Tinnitus is usually a psychosomatic symptom, especially if you haven't suffered any kind of ear trauma recently. Medicine only begrudgingly accepts the role of stress despite it being obvious to sufferers, however stress is only part of a much more interesting story. Look up John Sarno's work if you're interested.

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