by Afforess on 6/6/24, 6:28 PM with 103 comments
by blueridge on 6/6/24, 6:58 PM
by drones on 6/6/24, 8:44 PM
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
by plasma_beam on 6/6/24, 7:25 PM
by JPLeRouzic on 6/6/24, 7:10 PM
by adamgordonbell on 6/6/24, 7:11 PM
Some audio cleaning tools can do the same if applied incorrectly.
It makes sense hearing loss would make this worse. Less signal more gain needs to be applied.
by tomcam on 6/6/24, 8:28 PM
I love loud music right down to my core, but when I was in my early 20s it was already clear that many of my musical heroes were going deaf. The general rule is not to listen to anything in your headphones so loud that you can't detect conversation nearby. Another principle is if people can your music on headphones from more than a yard or two away, it's too loud.
So what it cost me was not cranking up my favorite music when listening. I grew accustomed a much lower volume than I enjoy. It wasn't hard, like getting used to decaf coffee or Diet Coke over sugary Coke. I go to a few concerts a year and don't ear earplugs.
Overall it's been very worth it and the cost has been minimal.
by subroutine on 6/6/24, 7:25 PM
This is not my experience. I've had tinnitus my entire life, and it's more of a phantom sound (cf. phantom limb) than a something that competes with sounds in the real world. That is, if there is any real noise like speech it basically gets muted. In a completely quiet environment however the ringing sensation can be comparable to high pitch TV static. The quieter the environment, the louder it gets.
by alexpc201 on 6/6/24, 9:55 PM
by neonate on 6/6/24, 7:25 PM
by baxtr on 6/6/24, 7:20 PM
But I don’t care about it. I wonder if I have a tinnitus or not.
by sentimentscan on 6/7/24, 4:23 PM
(After party i got quite sick with bacterial infection, and that caused me to go few doctors, one I think sixth doctor audiologist recommended to me MRI, as this is quite rare)
by arnonejoe on 6/6/24, 7:12 PM
by wyager on 6/6/24, 6:57 PM
You obviously need some kind of energy source (either an active amplifier or a noisy pump source) to have resonances that can be recorded. What would that be for tinnitus? Blood flow noise?
Well it turns out that there is thought to be active amplification in mammalian ears, via the outer hair cells. They have some sort of active motor protein setup that is thought to physically amplify incoming sounds. So you can get a self-sustaining resonance that way. A healthy ear will emit sounds from spurious or resonant activation of these motor proteins.
Apparently this is thought to cause a minority of cases of tinnitus.
I looked into if I could buy probe microphones to test my own ears. Looks like Etymotic sells a couple in the $1500 range (as of the mid-90s), presumably more expensive now. Couldn't find any good deals on used lab-grade probe microphones online.
by thereisnospork on 6/6/24, 7:10 PM
by xref on 6/7/24, 4:54 AM
by zackmorris on 6/6/24, 8:49 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VePV-gsNBNc
I feel like maybe the brain fills in the missing frequencies from damaged hair cells or pinched nerves and hallucinates the sound. Like in this Coke can red-cyan color illusion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/opticalillusions/comments/1cc8cwp/c...
Reddit regrettably makes it hard to link directly to images, so here's one you can zoom yourself with command/control +/- for proof:
https://gagadget.com/en/446542-a-photo-of-a-coca-cola-can-th...
Maybe a hearing aid could be set up to amplify the frequencies near the whine and dampen the rest. Kind of like adding cyan to the can so that it no longer appears red. Or removing cyan from the surrounding image.
I just tried doing a deep dive on how hair cells work, but I'm just seeing a bunch of research papers. It mainly says that they don't grow back after dying. I thought that the frequency they detected was based on their location in the cochlea, but it sounds like they have a random distribution of resonant frequencies instead.
Maybe gene therapy could be used to increase or re-roll the hair cell randomness so that other cells could take over for the missing ones. Or maybe a drug could make them grow or shrink slightly at random to change their resonant frequencies, like how eating biotin makes your hair grow.
Knowing nothing about this, I wish there was a way for people who geek out on stuff to be able to solve a bunch of random problems and make rent, like in a think tank. I get so bored and tired of working on the same old CRUD apps day after day as tech gets more marginalized with ever-increasing workload for the same pay.
by echelon on 6/6/24, 7:31 PM
On the cover, this article looks like pesudo-scientific hogwash and a marketing puff piece for some artist's album. It drones on and on.
But this morsel could be absolutely groundbreaking if true:
> The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
Is this actually real, or was this made up? Was it simply amplified blood flow, CSF, or some other biological and unrelated phenomena? Is anyone looking into this?
This is the absolutely wrong window dressing and treatment for this kind of news and investigation. This shouldn't be puffed up marketing, but should instead be in scientific news circles and in the hands of principal investigators.
I'm skeptical, but maybe there's a valid line of research here that could result in a treatment for lots of impacted people.
by nerdponx on 6/6/24, 6:56 PM
Here's the part that describes the discovery:
> The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical. More intriguingly still, the two women whose ears were recorded, De La Mata and Lana Norris – the musicologist whose voice appears on the album’s ‘PINK Noise’, and who is also a choral director – were the only two people whose ears were found to produce spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. “It’s something to do with hormone difference, but they don’t really know why,” De La Mata says. Present in most children but believed to fade over time, they’re also found far more in musicians than in other adults, for reasons yet unknown. It all raises a lot of questions. “What I have is tinnitus by the definition we have now, but maybe that’s not correct. Maybe it’s something else,” De La Mata wonders aloud.
Is there an academic followup to this? I would imagine that this is a pretty major anatomical/medical discovery and that the discoverers would want to write a paper about it.
by bowsamic on 6/6/24, 7:11 PM
EDIT why the downvotes? I’m honestly on the edge of deleting my account here at this point
by zzzeek on 6/6/24, 7:11 PM