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Tinnitus pitch above what I can hear

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So I have hereditary high frequency hearing loss as well as tinnitus. I tried a tinnitus masking app and while I was trying to figure out the frequency of my tinnitus I realized that I cannot hear at that frequency so I couldn’t match the sound. Does anyone have any insight on this? Am I SOL with the masking sounds?

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There are other methods which sometimes work better. Interesting sounds, or peaceful sounds like water dripping or rain showers. Give your mind something else to chew on. You can listen to news, music, there are many other choices than just frequency match masking. That isn’t always the most effective masking anyway. Best wishes. The DoD is one of the largest sources of tinnitus cases there is, and the spends a fortune both training tinnitus sufferers on how to cope/manage and providing resources like speakers and sound generators to help every year. I was told anything I could think of for which I could provide a plan for how it would help me would be considered and I know they’ve spent hundreds and I didn’t even ask for that much. One thing wasn’t effective, a Bluetooth speaker headband to wear at night. It would have been great if the batteries ran all night, but it only got about four hours in and then warning beeps that it was running out would wake me up. I went with a sound generator that plays a recording off an SD card and sends it to a speaker pillow. About two and a half years with that and I’m pretty happy with it. (My wife, on the other hand….)

Examples of other things to use include those little indoor waterfall displays, fish tanks with the bubble sounds, etc.

I wish you the best. Hope you get some ideas that work for you. You need to accept this and learn to live with it. Focusing on it makes it worse, at least for me.

WH

Thank you for the insightful reply. I have learned to live with it, as I’ve had it for years. I have a fan running at night to sleep. There seems to be more resources to deal with it lately and I thought I’d give it a try.

Some Tinnitus is generated by the brain.
Josef Rauschecker has a TED talk on the subject.

(I don’t know how to make the image smaller)

All tinnitus is generated in the brain. And it doesn’t surprise me that tinnitus is at a higher frequency that a tinnitus sufferer can hear, because one way of looking at it is that your brain is turning up the volume on frequencies it can’t hear coming in from the cochlear. By definition most of those will be ones you don’t hear well or at all.

@Tiffy11 said:

while I was trying to figure out the frequency of my tinnitus I realized that I cannot hear at that frequency so I couldn’t match the sound. Does anyone have any insight on this? Am I SOL with the masking sounds?

Wow, that is very cool! I also have 24x7 tinnitus, but luckily it’s at the same pitch (I think!) in both ears. However, if you look at my , I honestly can’t tell if I can’t hear at the same pitch as my tinnitus tone cuz I’m pretty much a snake belly across the board. And when I put my aids in, I don’t even know I have tinnitus, cuz my ears come alive and just hear fine with the aids. :slightly_smiling_face:

In reply to @Tiffy11

@Tiffy11 said:

I have a fan running at night to sleep.

I am so deaf as a cinderblock that I don’t even hear the small Vornado fan AND BlueAir filters I have running at night. Come to think of it, I barely hear my neighbor igniting an M-80 firecracker (as he’s done), but I sure FEEL it in my sternum. :joy:

Go figure I have a permanent ring in my ears at the frequency I can not hear. It sounds like when you turn off and old CR TV.

That’s a mad loss, sometimes the kind of rectification/compensation you need doesn’t follow the rules.

TBH I’d actually suggest to your audiologist let you have a pair of demo aids, a programmer and the software. With some basic tuition, you can pick how the aids work for you. The biggest difficulty is going to be driving enough high frequency sound in there without feedback.

You might do better with decent sound stimulus tools that you can bias towards the high pitch within your aids.

Yes! I just got a noahlink and the target software and did a bit of tinkering this morning and let me tell you what a difference already. I don’t think the folks at Costco are familiar with my type of hearing loss and they were not much help at all. They basically said I needed to pair a microphone to my aids. I am going to do all the research I can to make the most out of my hearing aids myself. :+1:t2:

Wow, that is so encouraging. Glad you are an enthusiastic and motivated DIYer, cuz you’ll be able to share your successes with us here.

I have tinnitus too and have trialled a couple of hearing aids and they didn’t help with the tinnitus. I’m wondering if this is because my tinnitus is at a frequency higher than what the hearing aids can help with (up to ~10khz). Does this make sense?

I have pink noise turned on, which is a lower frequency background noise. It seems to help. I have Costco KS10 which I self program.

I don’t think anyone, let alone me, understands tinnitus well enough to give any explanations as such, but I suppose it’s as good a theory as any other.

My tinnitus has (had) a frequency of around 8.2 kHz but my drops off steeply at 7.5 kHz, this has caused the pitch of my tinnitus to increase. I have now ordered a used set of HA’s that reach up to 10 kHz. Still waiting for them to arrive.

For masking sounds I like the Iphone background sounds “rain” and “stream” better than the Oticon sounds. You can chose to play them over the speaker or directly to your HA’s.

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