Tinnitus Music Player
A scientific study has shown that listening to music where the tinnitus frequency has been filtered out may reduce the tinnitus loudness. A more recent study has come to a similar conclusion. With this music player you can play your own music from your music library in such a way.
Disclaimer
You agree to use this application at your own risk and there is absolutely no explicit or implicit guarantee that your tinnitus condition will improve.
You also understand that you must know the frequency of your tinnitus to use the application in a meaningful way.
Usage
- Obtain the tinnitus frequency from your doctor. This is a prerequisite to use this application.
-
Set the center frequency of the filter to your tinnitus frequency. You can
enter the value into the textfield or use the slider.
The bandwidth of the filter is preset to half an octave as in the scientific study. -
You can also enhance the notch as indicated in the
second study
by turning on Enhance Notch. By turning on
Flatten Spectrum you can equalize
the energy spectrum by moving energy from lower frequencies to higher frequencies
(see figure 2 in the
second study mentioned).
Note that both Enhance Notch and Flatten Spectrum are only in effect when Filter is turned on. When Filter is turned off both Enhance Notch and Flatten Spectrum are ignored.
-
The symbol
denotes that Enhance Notch is turned on while
denotes that Enhance Notch is turned off.
The symbol
denotes that Flatten Spectrum is turned on while
denotes that Flatten Spectrum is turned off.
- Choose songs from your music library which are stored on your device and are not DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected. Songs which are in the cloud or are only available via streaming cannot be used.
- The patients who participated in the mentioned scientific study have listened to filtered music for about 12.5 hours per week for one year. After this period, a reduction of tinnitus loudness could be measured.
Tips and Tricks
- Note that when you choose songs, the previous selection is discarded.
- When you turn on the Locked switch, you cannot modify the center frequency and bandwidth. This is to protect you against accidental changes.
- When you start the application you can immediately start playing the song list from the previous run - no need to choose again.
- The button to the right of Loop can be used to repeat the current song again and again or the whole song list. By default this option is off. The button to the right of Shuffle can be used to play the songs in a random order. By default this option is off. If Shuffle is switched on, the songs are played in a random order. If Pulse is switched on, a colored circle with diameter proportional to the loudness is shown on top of the album art.
- You can conveniently select a list of songs by choosing a playlist in the song selector.
- In addition to the usual music player controls you can swipe left or right with one finger over the album image to go to next respectively previous song. When you swipe down the current song stops playing and playing resumes when you swipe up.
- The test tone can be switched on when no song is playing and produces a sine wave with the frequency of the center frequency. This can be useful to check whether the central frequency has a resemblance to your tinnitus frequency.
- You can also choose Brownian Noise, Pink Noise and White Noise.
Literature
A research report describing the method and the related experiments can be found here Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity.
There is also a more recent study Clinical trial on tonal tinnitus with tailor-made notched music training.