The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Please note: the following information does not constitute professional medical advice, and is provided for general informational purposes only. Please speak to your doctor if you have tinnitus.

Individuals who have tinnitus may experience a ringing or high-pitched sound on a constant basis. This may be true even in a quiet room or anywhere else where there is no actual source of noise. Tinnitus may make it difficult to sleep, interact with others or live a normal life in general. However, there are treatment options such as a test tone generator that may help reduce symptoms of the condition.

A Test Tone … Continue Reading

At AudioNotch, we like to emphasize that we’re based on scientific research. The majority of treatments marketed on-line for tinnitus are not actually scientifically supported, so it’s important for us to differentiate ourselves from treatments that have no scientific basis.

That said, “based on science” isn’t the same this as “100% proven.” The studies done on Notched Sound Therapy have been evaluated in promising terms, but they had limitations. That’s why larger studies are needed. The good news is that one such larger study (a randomized controlled trial) is now underway. It has been initiated by the discoverers of Notched Music Therapy:
A … Continue Reading

Is there such a thing as Sound Therapy Music for tinnitus? The term can be used interchangeably with “Notched Music,” “Notched Music Therapy,” and other terms. Originally discovered by Christo Pantev’s German lab, other experiments have shown efficacy with Notching other sounds as well, such as white noise.

To read about the science behind Sound Therapy Music, click here.

To summarize: Sound Therapy Music takes a regular song, and then “notches out” the sound energy at and around the patient’s tinnitus frequency. Then, patients listen to the music and healthy and unhealthy auditory cells are differentially stimulated. The healthy … 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

The authors of a Notched Music Therapy study discuss why they believe that Notched Music does not work in people with a tinnitus frequency over 8,000 hZ (A.K.A. 8 khZ):
An additional crucial finding was that the TMNMT efficacy depended on the tinnitus frequency. Even though we had relatively amplified high frequency music energy during the filtering process (Figure 4), and despite having utilized a headphone that reliably transduced very high frequencies, the TMNMT was on average only effective for patients with tinnitus frequencies ≤8 kHz, but not for patients with frequencies above this value. From … Continue Reading