My Ears

    I figure "My Ears" count as "Other Gear" haha


    Ok, so I went and had an Audiogram (by a very pretty Swedish doctor, so I'm going to have to get tested frequently!) and my ranges are still "normal" but in some parts, on the very edge. But I have noticeable tones in my right ear along with 2 types of noise.


    So I asked about some of the notes I hear (tinnitus tones) and if they could be compensated for by matching them in frequency and intensity but phased out and she said "No, it doesn't work that way".


    I was a bit stunned, so I asked, "Uh, hows that?" And she replied that it's essentially neurological damage, so what I'm hearing is how my brain interprets the damage. I still may be hearing such frequencies fine, but there may be no correspondence. You can only for sure phase-cancel a REAL tone your ear is hearing, not an imagined one your brain interprets it's hearing from neurological damage. Huh. Also, you can hear 3 tones. One from your imagination, one from the ear drum and it's parts, and one by-passing that going through your skull. Yeow. I feel like an ear-octopus. Or maybe an ear-Tri-pus to be precise.


    So there goes my million dollar idea down the drain of phase canceling headphones for tinnitus mixers, lol.


    Which brings me to the notion: I doubt anyone hears the same darned thing when they're in a thread arguing about what they hear, since all sense is interpreted by the brain, who knows how people evolve their own interpretations of sound and hearing?


    Well, in the end, I was happy to hear I didn't need hearing aids. yet.

    Yeah! I've had tinnitus for several years, caused by a medicine.. I thought of the phase cancellation thing and was told basically the same. Thanks for confirming , I always wondered if I was being told a story , because the DR didn't know how to answer it.

    Haha :) I think everybody has this kind of ear noise and high pitched tone- but not everyone notices it. I have them too. Some time ago i have asking people on other forum are they hear this kind of tone, and they mostly say "yes".
    I even generated such of tone for test purposes:)
    http://w520.wrzuta.pl/audio/3mySWFq6IeO/pisk_czysty

    usually a combination of all, and don't forget your lawn mower... Funny after playing on stage for 50yrs and being up close and personal at lots of concerts I never got tinnitus, until that damn medicine I took

    I did some noticable damage from the Kemper in headphones because it sounded so good, as real, I was blasting it withough monitoring the dBs. I got a decibel meter and saw I was listening at like 102dB!! So I dialed that stuff back to below 85 dB.


    But I look at it like battle scars. You can't complain getting hurt doing the thing you love. I'd give my left ear to have had the Kemper 10 years earlier!!

    Quote from whippinpost91850

    Yeah! I've had tinnitus for several years, caused by a medicine..


    Same here, going on 20 years now. Caused by an ototoxic chemical that was part of another medical treatment. Almost made me deaf so I count my blessings that I "only" got severe tinnitus.


    Learnt to deal with it but not all people do. Some even take psych drugs to deal. Not a trivial issue, that's for sure.

    I'm just trying to be as truthful to my experience and personal opinion that I'm clearly presenting only as a personal opinion no more no less in an honest and truthful discussion about equipment.

    Quote from MuddyFox

    []Some even take psych drugs to deal. Not a trivial issue, that's for sure.


    I can say from what i know that almost everybody are hearing the same "internal" noises - but some of us are more " hypochondriac type of people", or cannot deal with it.
    But I am only guessing, based on experiences and conversations with other people.

    I have them too since close to a year.


    It sounds like when you come back from a concert and lie in your bed with no sound. That kind of buzzing or semi high-pitch ringing.


    It really bothered me at first but I am getting used to it now. At least the sound I hear is constant without any shift in frequencies.


    I guess it is part of getting older plus the accumulation of concerts, loud music, loud headphones, loud walk-man, iPods, playing loud guitars, drums, hundreds of flights, etc... The list goes on forever. At least I had lots of fun and still do. I'm more careful now and turn it down a notch or two.

    The genesis of tinnitus is still not understood completely in medical terms I'm afraid.
    The interesting (and relatively new) thesis is (and this is not about phase cancellation) that we might have light notched dips in our audiograph (notched in a way we don't measure them when doing normal audiograms). But our brain realizes that there's too few data incoming from these frequencies and for compensation increases sensitivity in these areas, much like a sensitivity control in a mixing board. On the border of these frequency gaps we perceive tinnitus.
    The treatment is to find the frequencies and overcompensate by over-EQing these areas of relative hearing loss. Patients treat themselves for a few months by listening to EQ compensated music according to the available data.
    Consecutively the brain is tricked and re-learns that there is no hearing loss in these certrain frequency areas any more and tinnitus is getting much better.
    I have heard that the results are quite encouraging.


    The older, much more established therapy is that we can learn to not really hear/perceive a tinnitus any longer.


    Hearing a tinnitus is a brain function, not a function of the inner ear. When you destroy the hearing nerves of a tinnitus patient the hearing is gone forever but the tinnitus persists.

    I had it bad for a while and over time it has gotten better for me thankfully. There is an iOS app called TinnitusPro and it does not do phase cancelation but it notches out the frequency that you hear in your tinnitus in a music track so your brain fills in those missing frequencies. I have used it a bit and think hat over time it does help "trick your brain" a bit. It is very annoying to start so you will probably get to see your Swedish beauty a lot!

    Quote from SwAn1

    I had it bad for a while and over time it has gotten better for me thankfully. There is an iOS app called TinnitusPro and it does not do phase cancelation but it notches out the frequency that you hear in your tinnitus in a music track so your brain fills in those missing frequencies. I have used it a bit and think hat over time it does help "trick your brain" a bit. It is very annoying to start so you will probably get to see your Swedish beauty a lot!


    That's what I was talking about above. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't notch out the tinnitus frequency but over-emphasizes the notches in the audiogram.

    Here is an image of what this app (Tinnitus Pro) does: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c89r…j8od0/musicnotch.png?dl=0


    Others may take a different approach.
    Edit: Come to think of it I did once go to an audiologist who did what you are talking about Ingolf. First you found the same tone and pitch as the tinnitus and then played a track and then you slowly pulled down the generated tone to trick your brain into minimizing that frequency. I did not get to try it at home because at the time (2008 maybe) it was really expensive. There is probably an app that does that now too!

    Edited once, last by SwAn1 ().

    .............and frequency hearing loss. Seems that certain frequencies ( particularly in my wifes voice :saint: ) have all but been suppressed.
    Subtitles have become normal for me now. Being an ancient I suppose its all expected. Deep Purple did it for me in the end. Went in and came out not the same. Times of shooting without headphones and times of competing against the drummer seems to have been the culprit the audio man said. I live on......................

    I've had it severely for 35 years now. Several frequencies and rumble too, and it's l-o-u-d, man.


    IMHO, it's not just loud noises, but toxicity-related too. It's as if toxicity prevents the "normal" healing of damage occurring.


    Personally, I believe that once you've lived with it long enough and experienced those periods where you feel like it's the end of the world... and got through them, you get used to it. I mean, truly used to it; it's just there.


    Heck, I can't hear above 10-12k, but who cares? I've learned to leave frequencies I can't hear alone; often one ends up with better results if one can resist touching the high-end of a mix anyway.

    A Comment from a friend of mine here in SA.
    We all experienced army life for a bit in the "old days". maybe that's where it started. Dunno
    "So
    the idea is to somehow tell oneself that you are not hearing tinnitus and that
    you are not going deaf and that hundreds of R1, AK rounds, MSG rounds, 90mm
    cannon fire going off near your head when you where 19,20,21 had no effect
    whatsoever on the longevity of one’s hearing particularly when at the time all
    high frequencies disappeared for a day or sometimes more and something like a
    whistle was perceived as a crackling sound – a difficult paradigm to
    negate!!"

    I have tinnitus from loud rehearshals with a punk band. I wish I had bought musicians earplugs earlier but I didn't really know anything about tinnitus before. I loved hearing the loud music. Even when I bought the expensive earplugs I still used to take them off for some gigs as I felt disconnected from the gigs.


    Tinnitus is worse some days than others but you do get used to it to an extent. If you are struggling with it remember that it does get better - I think your brain learns to cope more.

    These are interesting posts for sure. Love Ingolf's addition and SwAn1's pointer to an App to play around with. Interesting concept, to boost those rings and have the brain re-calibrate.


    It all begs the questions about prevention tho. The Audiologist suggested I get those musician ear adapted plugs that reduce dB. Are they worth it? I can see using it for playing with a band or going to a concert, but when playing alone, you can just adapt the dB yourself if you can measure them, no?