The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Some of our users have noticed that listening to their tinnitus frequency using our tinnitus tuner, and then turning the computer generate sound off, can result in a temporary reduction in their tinnitus tone. This is a known phenomenon that has been studied and is known as residual inhibition. To read more about this phenomenon, click here to read a paper on the subject by Canadian researchers.

Interestingly, the mechanism of function of this procedure does not contradict the proposed mechanism of notched sound therapy. Notched sound therapy works by lateral inhibition in order to suppress the spontaneously firing tinnitus percept associated neurons. Residual inhibition works by increasing the auditory input at the exact frequency of the tinnitus frequency, thereby reducing the overall auditory system’s need to “compensate” for the reduced input at the damaged hearing frequencies (it is this compensation process that inadvertently creates the tinnitus percept by increasing the overall auditory system’s sensitivity level).