Is There Any Way to Measure the Tinnitus?

[issam]

Is there any way to let people know what is the tone and the volume level of the sound in my head?

 

[GregCA]

Yes, you can do a pitch and volume matching either yourself or with the help of an audiologist.

 

[issam]

Thanks for the reply, really I am a developer of android applications and I am trying to make an application to measure and describe my tinnitus but I have a problem that is people will hear something else in volume and tone if I have hearing loss

 

[GregCA]

Thanks for the reply, really I am a developer of android applications and I am trying to make an application to measure and describe my tinnitus but I have a problem that is people will hear something else in volume and tone if I have hearing loss

Right... but you can normalize it if you know your hearing threshold at the T frequency (look up dB SL i.e. Sensory Level). It's not perfect.

 

[Alue]

Yes, you can do a pitch and volume matching either yourself or with the help of an audiologist.

I don't think you can reliably do volume matching by yourself.

 

[GregCA]

I don't think you can reliably do volume matching by yourself.

Why not?

 

[maltese]

To be fair, if you want to show other people how it is to live with tinnitus, you can play the tone way louder than it really is 'in your head'. It will give them a better idea of how bothersome it is than an actual representation. Why?

The worst thing about T is that it never goes away, not the tone itself...

 

[Jason C]

Tinnitus for me is hard to put a volume on, when I am in silence it is pretty quiet, yet if I Listen too music I can hear it on top of the music at times, so in that case it would be louder than 70db or more.
Before I acquired tinnitus I though it would be a solid tone, not this fluctuating multi tone shit I have now due too acoustic trauma.

On a plus note, things have improved at almost a year into this. It's still there but my quality of hearing has improved. I am hoping things will get better in time.

 

[Alue]

Why not?

Do you have your own sound booth and calibrated equipment?

 

[GregCA]

Do you have your own sound booth and calibrated equipment?

I don't, but I don't think I need it. I have equipment that gives me an audiogram within 5 dB of a "professional audiogram" as performed by pro audiologists (at all tested frequencies). That equipment is my iPhone and Apple ear buds.
That's accurate enough for me. My audiologist tells me that their own audiograms are within 5-10 dB anyways.

The setup can be a bit annoying to do at home, and I'll admit I've had to do a bunch of "retakes" when an airplane decided to fly over my house during the test, but I'd generally get what I need in less than 20 minutes.

The lack of properly calibrated equipment has a much bigger impact on the establishment of your hearing threshold in absolute value than it does on figuring the loudness of your T in dB SL, since you only have to measure a difference in signal intensity, which is less volatile across hardware. The calibration is useful to determine the intensity of the electrical signal to send to reach a given dB rating at a given frequency, but that isn't what we are doing here.
Still, as per my previous paragraph, some "off the shelf" equipment can give you surprisingly good results.

In term of pinpointing T frequency, it's very rare (I've never seen it) to send an electrical sine wave at frequency f and get a sound wave at frequency that different from f, given the way speakers work (assuming no clipping from an amp stage, etc). It's possible that the frequency response of the hardware is different (in terms of gain), so you'd get a sound that has a different volume across hardware, but unlikely a significantly different frequency, especially in the traditionally audible bands.