I’m listening to my tinnitus squeal today pretty good. I noticed a few other things about it. If I open my mouth wide or push on certain parts of my face, the volume increases. If I clench my jaw hard enough, it almost entirely dissipates. 'course then I have shattered teeth to deal with.
I’ve also noticed lately that I have a harder time understanding dialog on the TV. This was beginning to worry me a little, so I hooked up a VCO to a spectrum analyzer just to see how bad things are. I was kind of shocked to find that I am basically deaf above 10,500 Hz. I’m like, “damn! I don’t want to go deaf.” My 20-year old son could hear up to a little over 15,000 Hz.
The I looked up the various frequency ranges of different instruments and felt a little better as most everything was in the sub-10,000 range.
I will be missing a few higher-order harmonics from violins and pipe organs. Oh, well …
That’s why I don’t like a lot of youtube stuff, that goes like, “And now we are going to add some hihats” and I don’t hear a thing. And I hate Omri, when he says “Ooooh this is nice” and I don’t hear a thing.
Nowadays I just say to myself “Well… this is not made for me” and skip it
There’s a genre of movies I tend to like, “mumblecore.” I think I will make the 500-4000 Hz range my stomping ground. I should be able to hear that for at least a few more years.
And yes, I’ve had that exact same experience with YouTube cymbals!
I have my tinnitus as long as I can remember (more than 50 years). There are 2 steady tones above 14 kHz, a B-flat in the left ear and a D-flat in the right ear. Over the time I got slightly hearing loss and the tinnitus increased in volume. By wearing hearing aids, the tinnitus goes down in volume but it is still always there.
Generally music sounds naturally through my hearing aids. There are more high frequencies, e.g. hi-hats are more prominent and lyrics are more clear to understand. I didn’t encounter any unnatural artifacts that do not belong to the music.
Make sure to watch YouTube at 720p or 1080p. YouTube uses high audio qualities (usually 160kbps Opus or 128kbps m4a for iOS devices that don’t support Opus) along with these video qualities so it will play back hi-hats just fine. But 480p or less uses low quality audio like 96kbps mp3, and high frequency sounds like hi-hats are the first to go.
There are / there may be correlations between COVID-19 and hearing problems like tinnitus and hyperacusis. I learnt this through a journalist/music activist I know and currently trust; he’s obviously not an official source, so if you’re concerned about the topic you may want to do your own searches at news/information sources you trust.
Please don’t hijack this topic to talk about COVID-19, conspiracies etc.