undefined | Better HN

0 pointsQuequau6y ago0 comments

I have a few Raspberry Pi boards and since I've seen folks doing stuff similar to what mostly do I thought I comment on something I hadn't seen yet.

I struggle with tinnitus distress and Ménière's. One of my coping strategies is to continuously play some sort of background sound in the areas I occupy.

I have a first gen RPi with a set of USB powered speakers in my bedroom that plays long form background soundscapes I get from YouTube on loop. This is the lowest tech I could muster. YouTube-DL is a command line tool that fetches content from places like YouTube and recodes it. I use mpg123 to play the resulting audio file on loop... and because I'm already using ssh for all sorts of other things as go about my day this workflow is basically completely integrated into my normal day-to-day activities.

When I first started doing this I changed the audio track on a fairly regular basis. Sometime to suit my mood, other times for the weather. These days it's more of a seasonal thing.

It works great. It's proven to be really reliable and it was really, really cheap.

0 comments

mad_tortoise6y ago

As someone newly with tinnitus, and with fading hope that it will go away at some point, I've been playing around with ideas of doing something like this. I was thinking of using frequencies to cancel each other out, but I think this might work much better.

QuequauOP6y ago

I don't think that it's possible to use certain frequencies to 'cancel out' the perception of tinnitus because for the over whelming majority of folks dealing tinnitus the noise isn't a real sound.

blunte6y ago

Even an imagined sound has a frequency (and probably?) a phase.

It might be possible to generate a tone at the same frequency and shift the phase until it's 180 degrees out of phase with the imagined sound. Perhaps the brain would do the math and cancel the imagined sound?

This can't really be automated since there's no way to measure the imagined sound, but it might be possible to make a little box with knobs - pitch, phase, and volume - that would all one to tune a cancellation frequency.

1 more reply

Pimpus6y ago

Tinnitus is usually a psychosomatic symptom, especially if you haven't suffered any kind of ear trauma recently. Medicine only begrudgingly accepts the role of stress despite it being obvious to sufferers, however stress is only part of a much more interesting story. Look up John Sarno's work if you're interested.

Pimpus6y ago

I briefly perused the wiki article for meniere's and it fits all the hallmark signs of a psychosomatic symptom, right down to medieval, I mean mainstream medicine not knowing the cause. I recommend reading Divided Mind - good luck!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsQuequau6y ago0 comments

I have a few Raspberry Pi boards and since I've seen folks doing stuff similar to what mostly do I thought I comment on something I hadn't seen yet.

I struggle with tinnitus distress and Ménière's. One of my coping strategies is to continuously play some sort of background sound in the areas I occupy.

When I first started doing this I changed the audio track on a fairly regular basis. Sometime to suit my mood, other times for the weather. These days it's more of a seasonal thing.

It works great. It's proven to be really reliable and it was really, really cheap.

0 comments

mad_tortoise6y ago

QuequauOP6y ago

I don't think that it's possible to use certain frequencies to 'cancel out' the perception of tinnitus because for the over whelming majority of folks dealing tinnitus the noise isn't a real sound.

blunte6y ago

Even an imagined sound has a frequency (and probably?) a phase.

1 more reply

Pimpus6y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse