Tinnitus and sound masking

Start with the important part. Tinnitus has many causes, some of which need investigating, and new or one-sided tinnitus — particularly with hearing loss, dizziness or pain — is a reason to see a clinician rather than to try an app.

Brainwavest is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition, and nothing here is a substitute for audiological assessment.

What follows is about the one thing sound can plausibly do.

Masking: a modest, real mechanism

Tinnitus is generally most intrusive in quiet. A silent bedroom removes everything else, leaving the internal sound as the loudest thing present, and attention goes where the signal is.

Adding low-level broadband sound raises the floor so the tinnitus is no longer the most prominent thing in the room. This is straightforward acoustics rather than a treatment, and it is the basis of the sound-enrichment approaches used clinically.

Two things follow from it being an acoustic effect:

It works while it is playing. It is not making a change that persists after you stop.

Total masking is not the goal. Many clinicians advise setting the level below the point where the tinnitus disappears — enough to reduce the contrast, not enough to replace it. Complete masking tends to require levels that are themselves a hearing risk.

Habituation is the longer game

The better-evidenced clinical approaches are built around habituation: reducing the attention and distress the sound commands, rather than removing the sound.

Sound enrichment supports that by lowering the contrast between the tinnitus and the environment. It is one component of an approach that also involves counselling and, where relevant, hearing aids. It is not the whole approach, and framing a noise bed as the intervention overstates it considerably.

This is why the appropriate first step is an audiologist, not a subscription.

What to play, if you use sound

Broadband, not tonal. A steady noise bed rather than a session dominated by a pure tone. A tone near your tinnitus pitch tends to draw attention to it.

Pink or brown rather than white. Gentler over long periods and less fatiguing at the low levels that suit this. Noise colors sets out the differences.

Low level. Lower than feels obviously helpful. This matters more here than anywhere else on this site — noise exposure is a risk factor for hearing damage, and hearing damage is associated with tinnitus. Turning it up is the wrong direction on every axis. Safe listening levels has the numbers.

Speakers rather than headphones, especially at night. Occlusion tends to make internal sound more prominent, not less.

For night use, a low descending session on a speaker across the room is a reasonable shape — Delta Sleep Gateway at 27 minutes with a short sleep timer. For daytime work, Sensorimotor Calm Focus or Vipassana Sensory Gating at low level.

Claims to be wary of

This is a field with a lot of confident marketing aimed at people who are distressed.

"Notched" or frequency-matched audio. Has been researched, with mixed results, and requires knowing your tinnitus frequency accurately. We do not offer it and would not want to imply we did.

Any specific frequency presented as corrective. There is no tone that resolves tinnitus. See 432 Hz and the solfeggio myth for how this style of claim usually works.

Anything promising permanence. Masking is not persistent by mechanism.

The honest summary

A quiet background can make tinnitus less prominent while it plays, can make a silent bedroom less difficult, and can support the habituation that clinical approaches aim for. That is the claim, and it is worth something.

It is not a treatment, and if this is new, worsening, one-sided or distressing, the useful next step is a clinician.