New earplugs won't amplify the sound of your own voice
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
AI headphones let you listen to a single person in crowd, by looking at them
I think part of it is that most of us speak more loudly to others when we can't hear them very well, e.g. when wearing headphones or on a mobile in a train
Sidetone is the small amount of feedback in the earpiece as you speak into the microphone. The telephone company figured this out 100 years ago and then, somehow, we totally dropped it when mobile phones came along. We've been shouting into microphones ever since.
It's maybe less significant for choir compared to e.g. rock band with amps or wind band with tons of brass, but you can still get ear damage. (That's where I got my tinnitus from lol)
They do make specialized earplugs for music that allow some amount of pass-through, and don't isolate as much.
Professional musicians nowadays tend to wear IEMs (In Ear Monitors), which are earplugs that drastically cut sound level but have an earbud driver that pipes in audio from the mixing board at a safer volume. This also offers better clarity, the ability for individual band members to hear themselves play better, and the possibility of a click track.
Despite the general public's lack of awareness of hearing safety, it's not really recommended that you even attend concerts without hearing protection (concert earbuds such as those from Etymotic Research) to attenuate the volume to safe levels, as venues are pushing 90-100db.
I went to a rather big multi-day outdoor rock show last year, and spent some time hanging out behind the FOH tent watching people work at various times because that's fun for me.
Hanging inside of the tent was a big, bright numeric LED display showing SPL, right by a big sternly-worded sign about the not-to-exceed level for the venue (which was, IIRC, 103dB).
For the headliners, I was regularly seeing 120dB -- and sometimes, 125dB -- presumably as measured somewhere around that point in space.
Choirs can get loud, too: I've read before that choir members can experience peaks of 110dB just from the sounds of their collective voices.
(Before IEMs became common, I worked extensively with a 5-piece band that had one aspect of their stage layout that they were absolutely unwilling to change, no matter how big or small that stage was: Each member had a "good" ear and a "bad" ear, and they considered it absolutely necessary to never be positioned so that their good ear was facing the drummer.)
Protect those ears!
Even if the cause of tinnitus is neural, or damage to the inner ear, perhaps it could be altered with bone conduction speakers? On the premise that any change to status quo might cause the neurons to completely re-evaluate their duties...
These two ([1] [2]; 2002 and 2020) say that bone-conducting and air-conducting transducers offer the same relief.
Since everyone, including this [3] seems to bury the results, I'm guessing that sound therapy isn't very effective.
[1] https://e-asr.org/upload/pdf/asr-200012.pdf (interestingly, this is Korean with English headings and captions. Is that common?)
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/1499202020907718...
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/204062232095642...
No idea if this helps with tinnitus at all.
[1] https://www.flareaudio.com/en-eu/collections/calmer [2] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1721/0649/files/ISVR_Offic...
My impression is that all earbuds I’ve tried suffer from the occlusion effect equally.
They are by far the best headset I have ever owned. Some minor quibles as always.
My main quibble is the touchpad, which is way too sensitive and I had to turn it off (probably a defect, I guess I'll send them in eventually).