Hello All,
I am in my second week of wearing Signia 7ix after wearing Oticon’s (micrite r) for about 5-6 years.
Practically speaking, if you have tried the notch therapy for tinnitus , what has been your experience? If it didn’t work out what did you end up doing?
Thank you
Joe
Almost a week and nothing to say on Notch Therapy working? Very telling.
What’s “notch therapy”? i assume it’s a program on the Signia ha?
My understanding of the term ‘therapy’ is something like, an activity that benefits a patient by reducing symptoms and the cause of the condition. I know of nothing that does this for tinnitus. One can mask tinnitus with various forms of HA generated white noise. But then you have, essentialy, another form of tinnitus masking the original form–which by the way is still going on.
no thanks. doubling down on tinnitus in order to ‘treat’ it has never made sense to me.
I have had tinnitus for almost 50 years, I have found that learning to put my tinnitus to the far back of my mind is the only treatment that truly works. I have learned to just not pay attention to it and it doesn’t bother me. As long as I am wearing my aids I don’t even think about it or realize I have it anymore. When I take out my aids at night I power on a sound machine in my bedroom that plays white noise just loud enough to mask my tinnitus.
The keys is this, stop paying attention to it, don’t stay in a quiet environment without someway to distract yourself, reading, listening to audiobooks or music if no one is there to talk too. But the number one key is DO NOT PAY ATTENTION TO IT.
As you can see the topic (notch therapy) doesn’t get much discussion. My understanding is if you can identify the frequency of your tinnitus, notch therapy can be effective. However I agree with others that the best solution is to learn to ignore it.
Lots of posts on the forum about tinnitus and notch therapy. It will for the most part tell you it doesn’t work or helps very little…
Try doing a search on questions you have. It’s very informative.
Good luck.
Notch therapy did not work for me at all. The biggest issue is trying to identify the exact frequency of your tinnitus. I found that mine is not static, and in fact recently figured out that the closest sound to the tinnitus I have is the sound of cicadas ( plenty in Australia this time of year )
I did spend about two months creating lots of notched music, with notches at the frequencies that I judged to be closest to my tinnitus. It was time wasted for me.
I used Audacity. Thinking about it now, I wonder if boosting the frequencies that my hearing is poor in would make music sound more “full” to me ?
Hi everyone,
I’d love to get your feedback on a free, open-source app I’m developing for notched music therapy. It’s not part of any research program—just a personal project inspired by my own struggles with tinnitus. My hope is that it might be helpful for others too.
The app is based on the protocol outlined in a 2016 research paper. If you know of any more recent studies or improvements to this method, I’d be very interested to learn about them! You can find the app, along with installation instructions and the download link, here: GitHub Repository.
Currently, I’ve only provided a macOS executable, but I’d be happy to create installers for Windows or Linux users upon request. I’d appreciate your input on a couple of things:
• Were there any issues installing the app?
• Does it run smoothly without audio glitches or distortion? (I’ve noticed that during silent periods, the processed audio is augmented with white noise. Personally, I don’t find it bothersome, but I’m open to suggestions!)
If you need help with the installation, just let me know—I’d be happy to assist.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
As far as notch therapy, we’ve seen it used in terms of notch-filtered white noise or notch-filtered music, but Signia seems to be the only manufacturer attempting to apply a notch filter to an amplification programming (reduced gain).
In my experience with Signia devices, they need a good amount of fine tuning in order to approximate real ear targets and, as notch therapy supposes adequate stimulation around the tinnitus frequency, this part should be very important when exploring notch therapy for tinnitus.
Personally, I have found temporary relief by listening to a mimicked sound through a noise generator. Essentially, I try to recreate the sound of my tinnitus through a loudspeaker or headphones and listen to it for a few minutes. The tinnitus reduction is temporary, but it is the closest I have gotten to (what I perceive to be) a real reduction.
I notched out my own music using audacity when I first got tinnitus, which was before Signia had introduced that option. My tinnitus got better over time. Are those things connected? Who knows. It helped feeling like I was doing something, like I had some control. I suspect using any music just to distract myself from my distress while I adjusted to the tinnitus probably would have worked.
I am not cool enough to install an unknown app from GitHub, but I do apprecite what you are doing. That’s exactly the tool that I would have liked to have a decade ago.
I am new to learning about tinnitus as I just got diagnosed. I will remember your statement: Do not pay attention to it. At this time, I am struggling with realization what this diagnosis might have on my life.
I got it while in the Navy, I never took time or had time to really think about it. It is always there. With my aids on I don’t pay attention to it. But sometimes at night it can be disruptive after I take off my aids. I sleep with a sound machine set to white noise. My tinnitus is white noise or some times called pink noise. Every once in a while I will hear a single random tone. The tone doesn’t last long enough to be disruptive.
I have really bad tinnitus in my left ear.
It’s also in my right but it’s severity comes and goes.
I have a tendency to sleep with hearing aids with the tinnitus program on.
I could say, come on suck it up, just ignore it.
In reality that’s not always possible.
What will probably happen is, you’ll learn to live with and adapt to it.
That’s what I do generally.
I do have bad days.
It’s not the end of the world. You’ll learn to live with it.
We all did.
After trialing the Signia Notch, Oticon Intent 2, now I am completing week 1 of the Phonak Infineo Sphere 90 and started to notice an immediate difference in tinnuitis moving from 5-6 (turn on some music to mask) to about 2-4 on average with one bad period yesterday pm- not bad for one week. So I am happy with the Phonaks. The streaming is the best I have heard of music, podcast etc and battery life is great. Direct Hearing to my knowledge has the best price at $3200-3300
Thanks for pep talk. I needed it!