Recently went live with a web site I built for audio masking tinnitus. I created over 440 files with white and pink noise and many other sounds, focused at specific frequencies.
Having suffered with tinnitus for many years I recently came across audio masking. This therapy certainly wont cure tinnitus but can offer relief in some cases. I found it helped for me, I use masking sounds when the tinnitus is really bad.
Looking deeper into it on YouTube and various other places I found that there were specific frequencies that, if suited, can cause you brain to get side-tracked and focus on the alternative sound you are hearing, thus softening or eliminating the constant ringing in your ears.
There’s many reasons why we suffer from tinnitus including tinnitus that will come and then go as a result of an ear infection or trapped nerve in the neck or ear. In a lot of cases it is unknown what the cause is and therefore something people tend to live with. Stress can make things worse as I have found and the more you focus or worry about it the more intense it can be.
Audio Masking
There’s a ton of sounds and waveforms available out there, with popular distractions being the sound of pouring rain, natural environments such as running water or a forest ambience. Popular generated sounds include white and pink noise. I benefitted from white noise focused at a specific frequency, this works for me.
Going the through all these sounds I realise that there wasn’t really much in the way of a large library offering many sounds at many frequencies and decided to build a web site with this in mind.
AudioMan.co.uk is the url I managed to acquire and I spent hundreds of hours researching and creating around 380 1hr audio files covering many frequencies and sound waves, covering a large spectrum of high, mid and low sounds for tinnitus relief.
Unique Tinnitus Audio Masking Sounds
Following further research and development with a colleuge who also suffers, looking at the current science and what's being trialed, I went on to develop my own fies I call 'ticks'.They are a specific frequency focused section of white noise or sine wave. The file plays for 7 milliseconds, including a 1 millisecond fade in and fade out. This is followed by 15 milliseconds of silence. That loop is then repeated. At lower frequencies it turns out that they sound a lot like 'crickets' which is a popular natural masking sound for tinnitus. Find them in the Masking Library, there's 50 files.
Identifying Your Tinnitus Frequency
On the AudioMan.co.uk web site I created a tone generator which may help people identify where the frequency of their tinnitus lies and then allow them to proceed with this in mind to find files that may help them mask their tinnitus. I point out on the site that you are not trying to blast out your tinnitus or cover it up, as there is a mix-point, often quite quiet, where the right sound at the right frequency could mask/distract your brain from the tinnitus sound you hear.
I recently went live and in addition to the main site created a YouTube channel, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok pages to help get things moving with traffic to the site.
Follow this link to view the Web Site I created and also hear the tinnitus audio therapy masking downloads made in the Metech studio.