Tinnitus

[vendic]

If anyone has issues with it like I do, you might want to check this site out:
http://www.notchtherapy.com/

While there are many sites charging to do the exact same thing, this is totally free.
Provided for by a sufferer from tinnitus for everyone to use and hopefully get some relief.

[vendic]

Stupid timeout. Just lost all the instructions I wrote.
Take 2...

To see if this will help your tinnitus you need to do the following:

1. Download Equalizer APO form here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/equalizerapo/
2. Get headphones
3. Configure Equalizer APO to be able to test each ear independently.
4. record the lost frequencies in hearing for each ear and put that in a configuration file.
5. listen to lots of music.


To do (3) I found this site great: http://plasticity.szynalski.com/tone-generator.htm
You need to first install and configure Equalizer APO.
Installing is simple enough.
configuring is shown below and you enable one channel at a time and test that ear.
I saved the file as eartest.txt and you need to include this file in config.txt to enable it.

Code: Select all


Channel: L
When # is removed it creates a lowpass filter preventing any sound in the left channel
#Filter   1: ON  LP       Fc   10 Hz

Channel: 2 C
When the # is removed it creates a lowpass filter preventing any sound in the right channel
#Filter   2: ON LP    Fc 10 Hz



config.txt should look like this:

Code: Select all

include: eartest.txt


Once you have the data make another file called tinnitus.txt with YOUR frequencies for each ear that YOU determined.
MY file for MY hearing is shown below:

Code: Select all

Channel: L
#left channel

#Filters only for left channel
Filter  1: ON  NO       Fc     7600 Hz Q 1

Channel: 2 C
#Filters for second(right) and center channel
Filter  2: ON NO Fc 8400 Hz   Q 1



The ON turns the filter ON.
The NO means use it as a NOtch filter.
Fc is the center frequency of YOUR hearing loss
Q is the width of your loss. The higher the number the narrower the frequency band in the notch will be.

To avtivate it you need to modify your config.txt file to the following:

Code: Select all

#include eartest.txt
Include: tinnitus.txt


Note that the eartext.txt file is now ignored and Equalizer APO will use the tinnitus.txt file.

That's it.
You now can listen to anything on your PC and it will effectively work to retrain your brain to ignore the ringing in your ears.
I offer no guarantees and the process is long term, in the order of months to a year.
If your frequencies are below 8000Hz, the recommended dose is about 5hrs a day continuously for a fast fix. Reports of about a month or so are expected.
If it's over 8000Hz, it's recommended to do 1hr sessions over the course of the day. It will take far longer in this case, going on about a year.

I can't claim it's worked for me since I've just set all this up today. Took all day. So if you have tinnitus, use the above and it'll only take about 30 minutes or so to setup. I hope it helps.

This is the same procedure companies are charging $5000 for to do. There is no need to go to them when all the information to do it is available to do on your own for free.

I'm not affiliated with any of the companies or products or websites posted. It's just what I found that gets the simplest results for free.

[SciFi Chick]

Well, you got to hear one of your favorite songs, properly, with the use of that equalizer, so that, in and of itself, is a bonus.

[geonuc]

I've seen this before, on FaceBook, YouTube or somewhere. On paper, it sounds like it may work. Not sure I have the patience yet to see it through.

[SciFi Chick]

I've seen this before, on FaceBook, YouTube or somewhere. On paper, it sounds like it may work. Not sure I have the patience yet to see it through.

vendic will be doing this over the next few months and reporting. It's actually really interfering with his quality of life, so it's worth the effort. If you can put up with it, totally understandable. But, if this works for him, and you find it annoying, it might be worth the effort.

[geonuc]

I've seen this before, on FaceBook, YouTube or somewhere. On paper, it sounds like it may work. Not sure I have the patience yet to see it through.

vendic will be doing this over the next few months and reporting. It's actually really interfering with his quality of life, so it's worth the effort. If you can put up with it, totally understandable. But, if this works for him, and you find it annoying, it might be worth the effort.

Hope it works out.

It's hard to judge how bad my, or anyone's, tinnitus is. How do you describe it accurately to someone else? With me, the ringing is in the ear that I lost use of a couple of years ago. The deafness in that ear is far more annoying than the ringing, although that occasionally rises to the level of very annoying.

[vendic]

It's hard to judge how bad my, or anyone's, tinnitus is. How do you describe it accurately to someone else? With me, the ringing is in the ear that I lost use of a couple of years ago. The deafness in that ear is far more annoying than the ringing, although that occasionally rises to the level of very annoying.

Using the above app, you can get a pretty good practical example. At least in my case since it's constant and at very defined frequencies. Which means it's quite possible to reproduce.
So what I can do is just induce those frequencies into each channel via a mixer/synth, or throw in pink white noise to mix with sound but filter out the non ringing frequencies, then mix the ringing channels with whatever you want and it's done. Again, headphones are the only way too do this properly.
Clearly it won't work for everyone since some people have shifting ringing , too many bands, intermittent ringing, or more whooshing than ringing, thus getting an accurate reproduction on it is pretty difficult or near impossible. To make things more complex, the listener would also have to have their ears tested and then corrected.

I made a correction file for myself that basically amplified the two lost bands with a pretty high Q factor since they are narrow band losses. It appears as if I lost about 30 dB in each ear at those frequencies, though I also seem to have lost some in the 4kH area but I didn't do a test as to how much. The only thing I had to do then was listen to it loud enough so that the ringing was minor compared to the music.
Listening to "Last of the Mohicans" as I remembered it when I was younger is really great. I had no idea how much my hearing loss has impacted me till then.