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!
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.
For sure, I tell my patients there’s no right or wrong when it comes to the type of sound.
If a certain sounds works for you, use that sound!
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.
Appreciate it!
Still looking. Closest I’ve found so far aside from the Widex app is this web page based generator:
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/acousticPianoSoundscapeGenerator.php
They also have other background noise options:
It’s free with optional donations.
They have an android app but it’s out of date.
Edit: Theres also Nature space but likewise, their android app is out of date (unsupported on newer devices)
I’ll give a dig into that, thanks for the effort, dude!
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 don’t have tinnitus, but I do this exact thing using the Sennheiser true wireless 3. You just have to set them to not pause music when the pass through is on, it works really well.
i wonder if doing this habitually would make tinnitus worse
Not unless you have it too loud. You don’t need loud sound stimulation to help control tinnitus.
Sound masking is the general treatment for tinnitus.
(I’m an Audiologist)
For me nonsense sounds make it so much louder. Your brain can’t make sense of static, white brown grey whatever noise so it definitely can make it 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.
Holy shit. I normally use my HomePod as a white machine but right now I’m on vacation and have been trying to find an app but they are all subscription based. A fucking subscription to listen to white noise…. I love that apple has this built in.
I’m not sure if background playback is a thing on iPhone, but if it is I’d run https://mynoise.net/ in the background for the white noise
Background playback depends solely on the developer and the method they use. It’s very much possible. This applies to both video and audio.
I don’t have tinnitus, but I have somewhat chronic Eustachian tube dysfunction that causes mildly painful ear pressure, and wearing my AirPods (or any in ear headphones) helps a ton, so on bad ear days I’ll wear them in transparency mode with nothing playing
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Interesting. I find most pass-through (including the Airpod Pros) to accentuate the higher frequencies, which both makes speech less intelligible and my tinnitus worse. Background noise does mask the phantom sounds somewhat, but I’ve mostly learned to tune out the whine (since literally none of the popular “tricks” work for me). In noisy environments (airplanes, for ex), I find the ANC of the APpros to do a good job of filtering out everything and letting enough speech through it’s actually clearer than w/o ANC.
There’s an App called Mimi Hearing Test It’s self explanatory and you’ll get a sound profile for your AirPods. It’s like HD hearing after you saved it to your phone. It levels out your frequencies. Once done you can’t go back.
so you can use any headphone with any cellphone, and any background noise, or any sound in general, not so apple enthusiastic
You can do that, but it’s provided on iPhone without any internet connection, it integrates seamlessly with system events, there are no download or install requirements, and if you use Airpods Pro, you can mix in environmental sounds. Plus, as another user mentioned below, you can add a toggle for this setting in the control center. That’s a stellar implementation!
I have tinitus and never though to use them this way, thanks for the post! Im going to try it out right now.
Do you really need all those apple products? There is tone of white noise apps in the store (I use android), I use “white noise baby sleep sound by amicoolsoft” to set some rain sound with thunder and make it play for 20-40min which is enough for me to fall asleep. I find earphones/headphonse uncomfortable so I play it on my phone speaker on medium low.
Edit: I set my feed to be sorted by “top six hours”, now I’m seeing posts from communities I’m not subscribed to like this one, it was not my intention to belittle any product. Everyone has their preferences. I need to watch what communities show up in my feed.
This is the apple enthusiasts community, that’s why apple products were cited. OP also didn’t say you had to buy the apple products. The post was phrased as if you already had them. It was a helpful tip, and not just for sleeping.
Contrary to popular belief people like headphones. Even so this person is suggesting using the Airpods while you are moving around and interacting with people and to just have the slight background noise to help. I love my AirPods Pro’s. They have exceptional sound quality and the noise canceling mode is pretty amazing. Can we let people enjoy/be excited about things?
