My story:

I'm a migraineur, which is a bloody fancy word for a dude who's got serious migraine issues. They have been known to be associated with tinnitus and I have it for sure. A quiet room is NOT a quiet room to me. I could have (in part) also brought this on myself from years of using prescription narcotics (un-hooked now, thank God) and Tylenols and Advils. It's a bit worse now at age 50, but it does not affect my mixing, I don't think.

Using this site and a good pair of studio monitors, you can check to see what frequency your tinnitus is ringing at: http://onlinetonegenerator.com/hearingtest.html and here too for a more specific target using the 4 waveforms of sound. http://onlinetonegenerator.com/

I know I have NO hearing past 17,200 and that the Tinnitus (unless it's got octave overtones) is around 17,250 or slightly above.

How you guys all faring from years of gigs, drummers, mixing, mastering, etc.?

AND: do you have any proven remedies other than white-noise and ambient sound to block the ringing out?

Cardamom

 

Hey Artic, please guide how to meditate, it seems i've never remained silent since the first breath man! May be many could benefit here...

 

I have Tinnitus too, both ears, since around 4 or 5 years now.
It has change my life habits. I suffer nightclubs, concerts, birthdays, even the movies in theaters. I use earplugs for all these occasions, but still, the ringing is more annoying after one of those events.
I have mine around 10,000 last time i check.

Music is my work, my way of living and the only kind of incomes i have, and it has been kind of a problem. Not because i cannot do my work, but because i have to take precautions. Keep the volume normal/low, until those moments were you are mixing when you really need to boost the sound to know if things are kicking or not. When recording alone i can work better, but with other is more problematic, because not only you are dealing with the volume, you are also talking, and loud, and session of 5 hours like that is very uncomfortable.

As Artic mentioned, try to keep in silence. In my case it works better not talking, if i can be in silence it will be better, but i can put a movie, with the volume really low, and be in silence, and that works. The time i'm watching a movie, if it's a good movie i forget about the ringing, and that's 2 hours of happiness...!

 

Mine has got much better since I quit DJing. slowly is becoming less of an issue, maybe I am just getting used to it, not really sure.
I only really notice it in the dead of night, and my only method of stopping it from keeping from sleeping is to make sure that I have worked hard in the day so that I fall asleep before it bothers me!

 

I have tinnitus. I just try to ignore it. Or hear music in it. (I always hear music/drums in hums, air conditioning, planes, whatever) Sometimes I think I can hear a distant "dush dush dush" as if I am near a festival, or there's a party next door (even though I have no next-door). Sometimes I suddenly hear a loud high pitch constant tone.........I ignore it and it disappears. [I've thought about trying noise cancelling..........discovering the tone i 'hear' and playing it somehow to see if i can get it outof phase, or whatever. Maybe?]

I also get migraines with a severe halo, such that I can't see properly. A tiny blob of light (like a dodgy pixel) appears in my vision and then spreads until it obscures most of my vision with rainbow/oily sparkly light.

I always recommend it to folk, but nobody ever bothers to do it. I have had great results, but I only do it in emergencies.

I imagine the word OHM as visually as I can (I have to put a lot of energy in to see visually at all) and when satisfied I count ONE.

Then I do it again, trying each time to maintain a strong image of the (chrome 3D text) and saying "OHM" 1, OHM 2, OHM3

Of course, as you set out your mind introduces all sorts of thoughts other than OHM, and the number. The point is to disregard them and purposefully return to imagining OHM for another iteration, and another, and another......no matter the intrusions your mind throws against itself. It takes a lot of determination - and that's partly the point, I think.

I keep going until I my brain starts kinda physically hurting; until the word OHM seems almost impossible to say again; until numbers seem to have almost no meaning and one has to force the mind into adding another number to the total. It becomes quite strange, almost painful to add another number. Almost as if the will is a tired muscle and can no longer continue.

For me, when I then stop, I have the calmest mind I have ever known - I can think only what I determine to think; there is no 'noise', no frenzied impulses. I also have what feels like laser-sharp focus -- I can focus on what I decide to, and give it complete attention without extraneous thought interrupting. I find it quite amazing. Lots of ways to do it, it doesn't really matter, I think, so long as you determine one thing to think about, repeatedly, and seek to discard all other thoughts and desires and will which seek to interrupt you. And keep going for what seems like way too long.........

I don't think there is any magic to it - it's just discipline to numb/rest one's mind through repetition of an empty/meaningless idea. But it works like magic - at least for me - as it provides the most amazing "reset" and provides a way to almost child-like capacity for attention and clarity.

Try it? til it hurts! :D

 

Last edited: Apr 15, 2016

my left ear is very special. first, the regular, always present condition:
it has a hearing loss at 1kHz of 12 dB or even more. it has a low and a high tinnitus around 700Hz and 12000Hz - thankfully they are not very loud. and now the strange thing: around once a month it gets an additional acute hearing loss at 1kHz and surrounding frequencies like 500 Hz and at 3KHz. the 1KHz then is completely gone - i cannot hear it, regardless of insane volumes - at loud 1kHz volumes i hear a distorted sound, somewhat like electric static noise, but at pretty high frequencies. the additional frequency dips are about 6 dB or more. this condition then gradually gets better again and resolves itself within a week - then i'm back to my "regular condition". has anybody ever heard of such a thing? bad ears sadly run in my family - half of my relatives have bad ears - the other half is fine.

 

How do you know all that? I mean the frequencies etc?

 

i used a tone generator and eqs in my daw. i did a sweep through all frequencies and used an eq to boost quieter parts so i had uniform loudness over all frequencies. once i also went to a doctor who preformed a hearing test and told me about the 1khz problem so i knew what i was looking for - but all other things i measured myself by doing the sinesweep and eqing the quite parts.

 

I can locate the causes of the high-pitched ring, throbbing in rhythm with my heart's beating, in my right ear, in this order: recurring incidents of screaming by my girlfriend (in bed) in that year a long time ago, years of electric guitar and other noisemaking, and sitting near a constantly-running window-unit air conditioner within a couple meters to the right of my desk for a half-dozen years. How I deal with it is to go without listening to music when I don't really feel like it (breaking the habit of "having something on" a lot of the time), monitoring my own music at moderate volume (which one should do most of the time, anyway), sitting with a window-unit air conditioner within two meters of the left of my desk, and not sleeping with 20-year-old girls.

 

Does anyone heard from a doctor about any cure? The ones i saw (about 5 different doctors, two of them specialist in tinnitus) said there's no cure for now. Anyone heard anything different than me?

 

You can try with Sound Forge sound generator.
Create a new file --> Insert --> Synthesis --> Simple

Once there, you put the number of seconds, and the frequency you want. You can preview from there, no need to create a clip. From there you can find which frequency is the one you are hearing in you ringing.

 

Been suffering this since age 15.
In my previous bedroom it wasn't a big deal since the noises in that room (air conditioner, fridge, etc.) were loud enough. Short story, many years have been passed...
Now that I've moved to a new house... It's like a nightmare, a living nightmare. When I'm awake I don't even notice it because I like to turn on some music, watching movies, have a conversation with some friends, etc. But when I sleep, the fear that I'm fearing just proven to be true. The tinnitus is real, it's a crazy ringing thing. It's so loud that I couldn't sleep in my own bedroom for months. Well nowadays, I survived. I don't care anymore about this and I know that I have to deal with it because I don't know how to solve this condition. It's no longer a problem to me seriously, just sounds like everytime I enter a room I have my cricket friend with me lol.

 

17K? lol thats extremely good hearing for anyone. ive had a nice stereo tone since sept 2002 from working around telecomm equipment constant noise for 30 years. my hearing drops like a stone at 8k. for the first couple years it drove me nuts made me irritable, couldnt sleep, etc. i have learned to ignore it and not focus on it though i havent experienced silence since then. there is no cure as its nerve damage. masking wont help because its noise across a large spectrum not a pure tone even though it may sound like that to you. ive tried all the possible relief therapies, accupuncture, noise masking, etc. nothing worked. the only thing thats helped me is learning to live with it. sorry i cant be more helpful best of luck it truly is a bitch.

 

i have ringing in my left ear mainly and i cope/coped with it by just telling it to go fuck itself! tinnitus lives from the desperation you have about it, equal to that annoying kid we all knew in school that harasses everyone for attention. just dont give it to him and he will stop annoying you!
oh and also dont spare your ears too much! dont think like "oh i have ringing i have to make everything quieter now!". just keep it at normal lvl. making everything super quiet wont give you youre silence back, but it will give your brain the sense of the tinnitus being an important and livechanging thing, something you clearly dont want.

 

I was born with high frequency hearing loss... anything above 3.6khz is all clicks and pops and mabye a whistle of air. I just wish this research could be done sooner > http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/hearing-restored-partially-noise-deafened-mice
and applied to humans but they havent reached that stage yet for human testing.

 

I've suffered from a very low hum, almost like an engine, ever since i started making music. I always mix on headphones due to my living arrangements. I guess constantly using huge ass seinheiser HD650 for hours at the time isn't good for your ears.
My main issue was sleep. The hum was keeping me awake all night long.
I found two things that helped me:
- Use headphones as little as possible. Over time, I noticed an improvement.
- White noise as most people will recommend. I play some "boom library" beach sounds on repeat, or wind sounds.

Nowadays I manage to sleep 4-5 hours a night compared to 0 a few months ago

 

There are meditation centers all around the world. No cost 10 day silent meditation sessions. You will learn a proper mediation technique. Food and lodging provided.

I had serious back pain from a major car accident where California Highway Patrol totaled my car on the 101, which turned into a freeway pileup. Anyway, on the 7th day of meditation, I had my first taste of relief in years. It also helps one focus and find peace.

And the silence is quite amazing, especially for those addicted to music and noise.

Here is their website.
Be Happy!

http://www.dhamma.org/en/locations/directory

 

I have some information that can help and in some cases even solve the tinnitus (and other) problem.
I know it works because I had tinnitus and now I don´t have it anymore.

Tinnitus are not always produced by a continued exposition to elevated levels of audio, another cause is a body disfunction caused by elevated levels of histamina : if you reduce that levels, the tinnitus will gonne away (of course, if that´s the only cause). I know it sound incredible but actually works.
The cause for that elevated levels of histamina is a food alergy.
How I discovered ... ?

In the last years I start to having systemic health problems that doesn´t sems to have any relationship between them (including memory problems, fatigue and muscle aches, insomnia, etc.). Doctors can´t attributed these symptoms to any particular cause, so I had to do my own research in order to solve my problem.
After reading a lot (... really a lot), I began to contemplate the possibility of a food allergy as the cause of my problems.
After my researching I have noticed that those problems appears at a certain age (wich is my case), after years of exposure at some kind of food (that vary at every person).

So I went to a clinical laboratory to make me some analysis.
My luck was to find a doctor who specializes in such problems at the lab.
Before making any analytical, the doctor gave me a questionnaire, and one of the questions was if I had tinnitus, and he explained that tinnitus is also a consequence of high levels of histamine in the body caused by food intolerance, which surprised me a lot.

After doing the analysis and find out which foods are the cause of this intolerance (in my case, four),
treatment is as simple as stop eating those foods.
After only one month I was a new person : tinnitus and other ailments have disappeared.
My life has truly changed.

I hope this information will be helpful to someone.

Best regards,
Electrick.


(And of course, I do protect my ears from audio at high levels )

 

Last edited: Apr 17, 2016