The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

I found the following story, but couldn’t get a good source on the anecdote:

Teacher has musical hallucinations

A maths teacher who persistently hears music playing in her head has teamed up with scientists to learn more about the condition.

Sylvia, 69, has suffered from the rare condition of musical hallucinations for the past decade after she started to go deaf about 20 years ago. At first she developed severe tinnitus but this led to what has been called “the iPod in her head” and due to her musical knowledge she was … Continue Reading

AudioNotch is pleased to announce another update to our highly popular free tinnitus tuner. Under the option “wave type,” a new type of sound has been added. The new type of sound is “BB Noise,” which is short for “Broadband Noise.” Many individuals have atypical tinnitus tones which do not sound like the classic “pure tone,” (which basically is a high frequency humming). This new option will allow users with more unique tinnitus tones to better match their tinnitus frequencies and thus use Notched Sound Therapy.

For those of you who don’t know, our Tinnitus Tuner is a free application that … Continue Reading

Tinnitus is a difficult illness for people who don’t have it to understand. Articulating the particular flavor of distress to someone who doesn’t have it is inherently difficult. Being “driven to madness” by noise is an affliction that can be difficult to garner empathy with – Van Gogh anecdotes aside. That’s why it’s important to seek out help and to seek out psychological support. I’m heartened to see the growth and availability of support groups in this regard.
The British Tinnitus Association (BTA) is launching a new six-week management course in the city on January 15, aimed at building coping techniques, … Continue Reading

If you know anything about electronic music, you’ll know that Paul Oakenfeld is a huge name. One of the bigger DJ’s from the 90’s, he was one of the predecessors to the new Electronic Dance Music trend that’s risen in recent popularity. As with any concert venue, the noise levels at such performances are always unsafe. Oakenfeld has recently come out in support of tinnitus awareness, urging musicgoers to protect their hearing:
Marking the launch of tinnitus awareness week, Oakenfold said: “I urge music lovers to wear ear defenders to gigs and avoid dangerously high volumes on … Continue Reading

Based on the anecdotes I’ve received from a lot of AudioNotch users, I’ve come to believe that many physicians are not very well versed in the treatment options available for tinnitus and the level of research behind them…. Continue Reading

There’s a fantastic article available that provides a great overview of the research that’s coming out of Michigan.

We’ve posted on it before, but this particular research is exciting because it offers a possible avenue for treatment.
Susan Shore, the senior author of the paper, explains that her team has confirmed that a process called stimulus-timing dependent multisensory plasticity is altered in animals with tinnitus – and that this plasticity is “exquisitely sensitive” to the timing of signals coming in to a key area of the brain.

That area, called the dorsal cochlear nucleus, is the … Continue Reading

The original discoverers of Notched Music therapy have released another paper that provides an excellent theoretical overview of the conceptual underpinnings of the therapy. Rather than rehash what the authors have already done  a great job of writing about, I’ll post the abstract below:
Over the past 15 years, we have studied plasticity in the human auditory cortex by means
of magnetoencephalography (MEG). Two main topics nurtured our curiosity: the effects of
musical training on plasticity in the auditory system, and the effects of lateral inhibition.
One of our plasticity studies found that listening to notched music for 3 h inhibited the
neuronal activity in … Continue Reading