As many tinnitus sufferers like myself know, the never-ending ringing in your ears can become unbearable at times. Sometimes white noise can help by making it harder to distinguish the ringing from other sounds. I know I’ve run fans in my bedroom while falling asleep to help distract me, for example.
You can use the iPhone’s Background Sounds feature to generate this noise for you. And with Airpods Pro, you can deliver the sound directly to a single ear and let external sounds in so you can still hear what’s going on around you.
Here’s how you do it.
- On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds
- Turn on Background Sounds
- Select the sound you want to hear. I like balanced noise for tinnitus relief.
- Insert your Airpods Pro to get them to connect to your phone.
- Activate transparency mode on the Airpods Pro to let environmental sounds through.
The background sounds will play continuously, but will be suspended for announcements from Siri and phone calls. Interestingly, background sounds are just reduced in volume by about 90% when you start playing Apple Music. There’s a setting in the Background Sounds pane that will disable the background noise while media is playing. Otherwise it will continue playing but will be reduced in volume. Background sounds resume normally after stopping any of those activities.
You can also add this to the control center for easy access.
This is a great idea! I just added it, but it’s tricky. For anyone coming across this who wonders how it’s done, here are the steps:
- Go to Settings > Control Center
- Scroll down to Accessibility Shortcuts and tap the green + on the left to add it to the included controls
- Go to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut (all the way at the bottom in the General group)
- Tap Background Sounds. A checkmark will appear on the left.
Now there will be a generic accessibility icon on the control center that will toggle the background sounds on and off.
If they add Fractal Tones then it’ll do what the really expensive hearing aides can do.
Study on Fractal Tones:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6197965/
Example of the fractal tones Windex uses:
https://youtu.be/LTPCn749iFc?si=a1PNAq-6p9Gy5TBb&t=2m10s
Edit: Should be Widex, not Windex. Do not spray Windex in your ear!
+1 for Windex.
On a more serious note, as a wearing of a hearing aid (singular), I have to constantly take it out to put my AirPods in to listen to high fidelity music, gain noise cancellation, or have a phone call for work. I long for the day that one decide can do it all.
Dumb question - which Widex app? I came across this post, and am looking in the App Store. There’s a bunch: Widex Tonelink, Widex Beyond, Widex Zen, Widex Evoke, Widex Moment, Widex Enjoy….
I know on the hearing aides themselves it’s called “Zen” which includes white noise options, narrowband white noise, and the fractal tones. I also think there’s an option for combining white noise with fractal tones. Don’t know if there is a “notched therapy” option (play white noise or other sounds but excluding the frequency of your tinnitus.
The fractal tones can also be tuned by average frequency and the number of tones played per time period per channel. I know mine plays more tones on the ear opposite where my tinnitus is.
I’ll post another reply if I can confirm a good fractal tones app. I did a short search in the past but gave up when I came up empty.
While they’re nice tones, I wouldn’t buy them just for masking tinnitus.
Hearing aids are expensive yes, but I’d only buy them to be hearing aids. The masking is a nice bonus feature.
Most research has found almost any sound can be an effective tinnitus masker. A lot of people that are bothered by tinnitus also have anxiety disorders and the calming tones are likely helping in other ways, like helping those people relax.
I fit hearing aids all day. Very rarely use the masker settings.
Of course it varies by tinitus sufferer.
I absolutely would not recommend dropping $7000 on a pair of hearing aides just for masking. That said, I’ve found that the fractal tones and nature sounds (not from the hearing aides) with various levels of sounds help me where simple white noise wouldn’t.
My T can be masked by white noise but in the 85-90dBm range. It’s also complicated with the fact that it’s only in one ear.
Until I discovered the right nature sounds track to help me sleep, I was barely getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night.
I know this is an apple community, but does Android offer something similar to this? My partner has pretty server tinnitus, and this would really benefit her I think…
As long as you have ANC ear/headphones; noise apps on Android are a dime a dozen. There isn’t an inbuilt noise generator on androids though.
Yeah I guess I mean the combination of it being part of the os and the transparency mode of the airpods. I’ll look into it further.
i wonder if doing this habitually would make tinnitus worse
A few tips for Android users.
Sometimes the sound generator apps have a repeating pattern that you might be able to detect. Instead, try the Brownian noise from https://archive.org/details/TenMinutesOfWhiteNoisePinkNoiseAndBrownianNoise - perhaps best loaded into a media player which does crossfading on repeat, such as JetAudio etc.
If using it for sleep, you may want to silence apps on your phone. However, you may find the occasional app (such as WhatsApp) which will not silence itself in DnD mode. In that case, try Alertify - it can take over the role of generating notification sounds for such apps, and obeys DnD.
