The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

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

http://www.ucdenver.edu/about/newsroom/newsreleases/Pages/How-to-treat-Menieres-disease.aspx

New research illuminates a possible understanding of the pathophysiology behind Meniere’s Disease:
Researchers at University of Colorado School of Medicine may have figured out what causes Meniere’s disease and how to attack it.  According to Carol Foster, MD, from the department of otolaryngology and Robert Breeze, MD, a neurosurgeon, there is a strong association between Meniere’s disease and conditions involving  temporary low blood flow in the brain such as migraine headaches.
A possible avenue of treatment is also implied by these research findings:
“If our hypothesis is confirmed, treatment of vascular risk factors may allow control of symptoms and result in a … Continue Reading

Fascinating research from the University of Michigan has illuminated some amazing new results:
She explains that in tinnitus, some of the input to the brain from the ear’s cochlea is reduced, while signals from the somatosensory nerves of the face and neck, related to touch, are excessively amplified.

“It’s as if the signals are compensating for the lost auditory input, but they overcompensate and end up making everything noisy,” says Shore.

The new findings illuminate the relationship between tinnitus, hearing loss and sensory input and help explain why many tinnitus sufferers can change the volume and … Continue Reading

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, because I can’t postulate a mechanism for why this might work. But consider the following description of a tinnitus treatment:
Subjects in the intervention group underwent laser therapy for 20 sessions, every other day, 20 minutes each session, which was a combination of protocols used in the previous studies [1, 2, 13]. A low-level laser beam with wave length of 650nm and intensity of 5mW was irradiated to the ear via mastoid … Continue Reading

Notched sound therapy can function with a variety of auditory inputs that are then processed to remove the notch at the user’s tinnitus frequency.

Many of our users have asked us about using ambient natural sounds that fade into the background while they are listening, and furthermore, are pleasant to listen to and provide minimal distraction.

We’ve now created the option to listen to Notched Natural Sounds. Each Notched Natural Sound has a specified effective frequency range. If your tinnitus frequency exceeds this range, then there will not be enough sound energy for an effective Notch to be created and it … Continue Reading