The washing machine in my ear, and an empty boat | Hacker News Reader

The washing machine in my ear, and an empty boat

blog.klungo.no

103 pointsdanielskogly52 comments

Mine was the sound of ocean waves. I used to play rain and ocean waves to get my kids to fall asleep. To my surprise, I turned off the sound when they fell asleep but the waves were still crashing on the shore. I assumed the neighbors were playing it for their children as well.

The same thing the next day, I thought the neighbors had just left their noise machine on all day. At night it became louder and I went outside to check if I was the only one bothered by the noise. I finally asked my wife, she said she hadn't noticed it. Thought she was going deaf. It was starting to really bother me, it was as if they had dialed the sound to 11.

I went outside, and surprisingly I saw a neighbor looking out as well. I went back in, plugged my earphones and played an audiobook. Unfortunately I chose a Lord of the rings rendition with sound effects.

I got up in the middle of the night, and noticed that the sound was just as loud in the bathroom as in the bedroom. Kitchen and living room, all the same. Whether I covered my ears or not, it all sounded just the same. I laughed to myself.

I still spent several weeks of sleepless nights until it went away on it's own. What a terrible experience it was.

For me what helped was creating a long white noise sample, then filtering it to have a peak around the frequency of my particular tinnitus and playing it in a loop at barely audible levels from a good stereo in my bedroom. I'm not exactly sure why that works but to me it seems like having an actual irregular audio signal entering your ears prevents your brain/ear from maintaining a self-oscillating tinnitus.

Wow, super interesting! How did you find the right frequency of your tinnitus and how did you create the track?

My comment also contains the phrase "super interesting". Now I wonder where that comes from. However, technically to find the frequency in question you could take a white noise generating sound source and connect that to an EQ with an audible dB boost in a narrow range and sweep that through the entire frequency range until you tune it to match the noise in your ear. To create a filtered noise track you could apply a high pass filter and a low pass filter in combination to "bracket" that range and create a narrow band of noise. Enjoy the silence, and check out Aphex Twin (start with: selected ambient works 2). :)

For that I used Reason (digital audio workstation), create a single sine wave synth and played on the keyboard until I found the right frequency. I already knew my tinnitus was a low one for me (sounded like a mains hum) so was looking in the 20 - 200 Hz range.

You don't need the exact frequency really, just create a white noise sample in Audacity. The filtering just helps to allow playing the noise at the lowest overall level possible while still being effective in suppressing the tinnitus.

I think I could have achieved the same filtering using one of those hi-fi equalizer modules that were all the rage in the 80s and 90s.

I tried to do something similar, but I discovered that my hearing range ends at a lower frequency than my tinnitus' apparent frequency. It's interesting that my body is synthesizing a signal higher than I can actually hear.

That's super interesting I'm totally going to try this! I have mild tinnitus. I was in a band. I always wear ear plugs at other people's shows but did not wear ear plugs at band practice or our shows. I guess in hind sight, the situational need to be in the zone and hear everything overrode the common sense notion of "oh yeah of course I should always be wearing ear plugs".

Anyway, the tinnitus does sound somewhat like noise with a peak at a certain frequency. I guess I just think of it as "blood noise". Susanne Vega reference? Anyone? Okay, I'll leave the room now. (great song, check it out)

If both the audience and the band members have to wear earplugs, then how about simply not playing so fucking loud?

I mean, I don't know who you are or what kind of concerts you go to but Fuck you I'll take the bait on this one. Maybe Tiny desk concerts are for you. Stadium shows need volume. Every show needs some amount of volume to create an experience for that genre of music. Back then I had to haul hundreds of pounds of gear in a van to create that sound for my band and now I'd just have to bring a suitcase and plug in to the house system. These days on stage is pretty quiet and the bands all have in-ear monitors but you have to move a lot of decibels to create an experience for any genre. It was behind the band on stage then and killed your ears and now it can be in front of the band and just point at the audience and I think it's better for everyone. It's always a physical experience and the sound volume is part of it. Have you ever been at a show where your favorite band was playing your favorite song and people are talking over the band and thought that was kind of annoying? Somewhere in between is a range of venues and experiences. Yes, it's bad for your ears but you're not going to sit around in a quiet lounge by yourself. Live music is loud. Yes it's probably too loud. My ears are fucked. Thanks for your comment! Sounds like you have a lot of useful insight for the whole concert industry. Have you run sound at a show? Sounds like you are qualified to hand out ear plugs and that's about it. I would gladly exchange my tinnitus for your bullshit snark.

I'm afraid your hearing damage is causing you to yell at people not just in real life, but on the Internet as well...

Louder music sounds better. It's a common high school psychology lab to reproduce this theorum.

So sound men turn the volume up, which causes them to get used to the volume and experience hearing damage, which causes them to turn it up more, and the cycle repeats.

P.S. this also applies to classical and jazz. Turn the volume up on those for best enjoyment.

In a conceet environment there can be thousands of people literally screaming. The only way to achieve an acceptable SNR throughout the venue is to crank the signal. Being able to feel your favorite music resonating in your body is also a big draw for some people.

Susanne Vega has a great oeuvre for an artist that is basically known for only one song (and a B-side at that!).

Yeah. It's just a hunch, but I suspect the brain has a tendency to create signal by itself if 'outside' drops below certain levels.

Such self-generated signal may be more annoying than low level external noise.

Over the past summer, it's been mosquito sound for me. There'd be a few, I'd kill 'em, and then sound of the last one would keep 'ringing in my ears' even though I cleared the space of mosquitos.

But hearing is complex. Things like diet, exercize, blood pressure, history of exposure to loud noise, drugs, age etc all play a role.

I have occasional tinnitus and I really got a lot out of https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php which has a wide range of noise generators and lots of knobs.

PSA anytime tinnitus is brought up. I thought I had tinnitus but it turned out to be ear wax resting against my ear drum, and the doctor fixed it in about 5 minutes.

I was surprised with the range of sounds this produces.

I was hearing both white noise and low whistling, the source of which seemed to be moving.

So this happened to be my experience too, but with a slight twist.

In 2020, I was hearing strange sounds and went to the doctor - turns out it was earwax pressed against my ear drum and a bit of infection.

In 2021, I had similar sounding noises and went to the doctor - turns out it wasn't earwax and he couldn't pinpoint on what the reason could be.

It is 2023, I am still having that sound :(

The same happened to me recently. It came suddenly, but a visit to the doctor diagnosed it as ear wax. Took ear drips to soften and remove the wax, and the noise disappeared in no time.

Thank you so much for posting this.

The narration was charming and funny. I suspect a lot of us find ourselves yelling at the man in the boat.

"The Empty Boat" impacted me to such an extent that I had to take a long walk.

I'm someone who often finds poetry really difficult to process, especially in realtime. This poem was just so profound that it cut through today's BS and I am somewhat changed for it.

Thank you for the kind words, it means a lot :)

Empty boat makes me think of support of digital services.

Google saves millions upon millions every month by claiming "it's an automated system, we didn't choose that action, so we aren't responsible". There is no chat support to complain to for most of their products.

This model is spreading across the economy: intentionally "leaving boats empty" so people feel like there isn't a person to be mad at.

But corporations are not faceless autonomous entities: they are collections of people willfully choosing to craft this facade of emptiness to avoid responsibility, costs, or even awareness of when they do harm.

These boats are not empty, but the people in them want you to believe they are.

> Google saves millions upon millions ... There is no chat support to complain to for most of their products.

If people are not happy with their services, why don't they just ask for their money back?

Often times, "all or nothing" is not the best solution to a problem.

My company recently reaffirmed to keep telephone a major channel for customer interaction. We deal with people going through a critical period in their lives (the start of permanent disability) and our ability to service them directly affects their welfare. Obviously we could automate it all via automated forms and pick an approach that puts the burden of proof on the customer. We choose to actively help them meet that standard. Back-end needs 100% efficiency, front-end needs 100% clarity, the customer needs support. We could improve profits by squeezing this lemon. It's a handful of IT staff for the forms instead of several dozen people servicing customers. It would even improve profits massively via the absence of claims. We choose not to. Our stakeholders (better) understand. In comparison to what I read on this platform on US-big corp culture, I feel lucky that my stakeholders do understand. We get to make this choice. It even benefits our brand in the long run. Sometimes customers (firms) go for the cheapest insurer, usually backed by foreign money (no flame their, that's EU competition as it is ment). Quite often they return 3 years later. Servicing former employees well is a service that employers recognize.

"the sound would disappear when I stood up" - doesn't sound like tinnitus. There are things like heavy machinery which produce low frequency vibrations which are audible in some rooms depending on acoustics. I once lived near a rail line which was having work done. In one room I experienced the hum, no others, and it would stop when I stuck my head out the window. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum

> "the sound would disappear when I stood up" - doesn't sound like tinnitus.

Laying down or standing up could have an influence on some types of tinnitus I guess, as can movement of the neck on others for example. I wouldn't rule this out a priori.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23422-pulsati...

Sounds like pulsatile tinnitus.

This happened to my wife and I (so immediately knew it was real). Turns out it was container ships at the nearby port. I live in Hamburg and the port is quite huge. One night I decided to bike down to the river and it became immediately obvious. Not an empty boat, though knowing did make it easier

If I’m being honest I would probably be angrily yelling at that boat.

I would probably also be angry at the invisible boat-owner who didn't tie it properly.

The presence of an annoyance implies the existence of someone to be angry with, one might say.

One odd thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that in a quiet enough room you can hear the blood flowing through your body. Is this phenomenon considered tinnitus? For me, earplugs allow me to hear this sound better (similar to being under water). I write “better” because it’s calming for my sleep and lets me get to sleep faster. Even stranger, I find it hard to sleep without earplugs for this reason.

https://www.healthline.com/health/pulsatile-tinnitus

For me it turned out to be an instant water heater trying to keep pipes hot. Went at the electrical stuff first l. But even after engaging local power company and long distance distribution folks, nothing was done. But, turning off water heater at night stops it. So much relief after years of noise.

Exactly what did happen to me. Actually my condition is a bit worse, as I have also low freq parastesia (irregular ~70Hz), I "hear my parastesia" (I have also a weak high freq tinitus in the other ear, and on "crisis" my parastesia is so intense, it can give me muscle cramps, it is usually worse during summer).

I was sure it was from "outside", and when I moved out to the other side of the world, it followed me... was actually my body giving me hell.

Nowadays, my body decides how I live and nobody else, not even me. But the hard part came after that: it took more than 10 years for my administration to aknowledge it and even with that...

I’ve been bothered by a low frequency noise the last few days and I’ve yet to find the source.

It’s not quite constant, can hear through my earplugs. It’s almost like a busy set of hard spinning drives in a noisy old PC as heard from a floor below.

I need to talk to my neighbour today to see if he’s got any new appliances/devices etc. And invite a friend over to see if they hear it too…

Pretty sure I don’t hear it elsewhere so luckily not tinnitus but it’s been driving me a bit crazy!

Could be anything. Yesterday I noticed weird rattling sound... Turned out on desk-alarm clock thing one battery had gone bad. And whole thing started to make noise. I would not have guessed that sort of noise to be caused by that...

wow, I have a very similar problem but I have always considered it more like a motorcycle slowly revving in the distance than a washing machine. It does occasionally stop and then start again without a clear pattern.

Rather than the drastic attempts at vibration dampening the author took, I discovered the problem was in my head by spending time in very distant locations and noticing the issue remains.

For a while when I was younger I could sometimes hear a steam train when trying to sleep. I had no illusions that it was from outside however, and the rhythm synced to my heartrate.

It turned out that I had an undiscovered hole in on of my eardrums that sometimes caused moisture and odd pressure build up in my inner ear. I got it fixed and haven't heard the train since.

If you create a suction over your ears with your palms and fingers facing backwards, flicking your fingers onto your skull for a few seconds, it gives some release of the tinnitus.

I didn't even know the slight ringing in my ears was tinnitus until I did the above. I don't listen to loud music but I do use earphones solely to listen to any audio.

I started to do this a few years ago and it works for a short while, often just enough that I need. I also have done it for extended period and the bells from the finger tapping start to turn choppy, less like bells and then the tapping eventually stops creating sound. It is very weird phenomenon to me.

I've always found the MyNoise tinnitus track to be mysterious but it seems to work at least for a short amount of time:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...

I don't think it is an empty boat for me. I think it is the Air Conditioner motor of neighbors (I don't have one). It is especially grating in winter - as I would switch off my fan and sounds are amplified in the cold. Insects chirping (Cicadas?) during rainy seasons are the worst.

depravity or deprivation though? (last line of article)

depravity: moral corruption; wickedness deprivation: an absence or too little of something important

Sleep depravity would be a sleep that is morally corrupt. How does that look like? ;-)

Hah, thank you! English isn't my first language, definitely meant deprivation. Updated the article :)

Maybe one that fed on the sleep of others, that'd be depraved!

Happened to me before, I thought it was a generator running at a construction site down the street. It wasn't that long ago but I don't recall exactly when it stopped or if anything correlated.

I used to think that the generators were running at the bank call center 1/4 mile away. I only heard it when it was very quiet, any noise at all and the low droning disappeared.

I took more vitamins during the early days of the pandemic and magically the generators stopped running.

Not sure if related but when I yawn very hard I can hear the faint water sounds flowing in my radiator, even when I’m not anywhere near said radiator.

As for the boat I'd be worried; potentially some has lost something likely valuable to them, or worse fallen overboard.

I wonder if The Hum is actually tinnitus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum

Given that this started in 2022, I’ll just remark that both Covid and the mRNA Covid vaccines have been reported to cause tinnitus.

To be fair, lots of things have been reported to cause tinnitus.

And from what I can tell, nearly all of the handful of cases in clinical trials that have actually been studied were very temporary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com