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Comment by zogomoox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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