MemberNotch therapy removes sound, so it doesn't particularly surprise me that there is no sound coming out of the hearing aid (unlike other aids that try to mask T by emitting the masking sound).
Notched Music Therapy (DIY, AudioNotch, etc.)
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Notch therapy removes sound, so it doesn't particularly surprise me that there is no sound coming out of the hearing aid (unlike other aids that try to mask T by emitting the masking sound).
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- High frequency hearing loss and lifetime noise exposure
You should hear all frequencies except the part that has been notched of the sound you are listening to. No sound sounds to me like you're not receiving the bluetooth signal to your hearing aids. I wear Phonak V90T and need to wear the bluetooth device around my neck for it to receive the sound. Can you hear other un notched sound files?
There is a new app for Android, notched music player called Tinnitus Therapy Tunes
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.medical.android.ttt
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.medical.android.ttt
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ManagerDo you know if this app can notch all sound output on the device? It seems unlikely, since it's not in the description. I think something like that would be the best solution.
Does anyone know of such an app? No pre-processing? Live notch filtering?
This app seems to do something close to what I described.
DSP Audio Filter
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wolphi.filter&hl=en
The problem with this app is that it takes the input from the microphone as the audio source. So that will not work for the intended purpose.
The advantage of such an app would be that you can use any audio app to play any sound file, local or streamed, and get notched output instantly. It may be a bit heavy on the CPU, but I would be willing to try it out. It can't be much worse than Facebook app and others that are already working in background and overloading the CPU. It should not be a problem if it's a high spec device.
DSP Audio Filter
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wolphi.filter&hl=en
The problem with this app is that it takes the input from the microphone as the audio source. So that will not work for the intended purpose.
The advantage of such an app would be that you can use any audio app to play any sound file, local or streamed, and get notched output instantly. It may be a bit heavy on the CPU, but I would be willing to try it out. It can't be much worse than Facebook app and others that are already working in background and overloading the CPU. It should not be a problem if it's a high spec device.
So, where are the glowing reports of success using this therapy?
Who is sleeping all night to notched white noise (etc)?
Who is sleeping all night to notched white noise (etc)?
Who says it's not working on forum members?
As you know, any sound therapy is a very long process. Many people give up early and claim it doesn't work (I admit it's a pain to comply - but it is what it is). The studies, on the other hand, are quite rigorous about patient compliance, and it is not unusual to have studies that span across 6 to 18 months. Plasticity is a slow phenomenon, and without compliance, you can't derive any useful data from anecdotal reports.
Finally, this forum is a biased subsample with an unusually high proportion of people who have "difficult T". It's not so surprising to me that many traditional techniques aren't working well for them: if they did, they wouldn't be here anymore.
In other words: I wouldn't give much weight to anecdotal evidence reported on forums. Go with clinical studies: you can expect much more discipline and therefore, a highest level of trust in the results.
That all makes sense to me. Thanks!
I find most of the studies on TMS to be pretty encouraging also. I'm currently getting TMS at two locations on my head while listening to notched white noise, 5x per week. I'll post more about it in the TMS thread soon.
I find most of the studies on TMS to be pretty encouraging also. I'm currently getting TMS at two locations on my head while listening to notched white noise, 5x per week. I'll post more about it in the TMS thread soon.
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I can't give a glowing report of success but I use notched white noise as well as several other sound therapies. Some say don't sleep with them and others say do and I slept last night with "Simply Rain". I can't say if that's a solution but I do feel like I get some residual habituation from all the sounds I use. I also wear Phonak hearing aids with a tinnitus masker built in and listen to that almost all day with some breaks. It is a huge help in dealing with my latest spike which has been on going since February. It's slowly improving but there are some really bad days followed by some good. Hope soon the good will outnumber the bad.
Yes!
My understanding is that you need to widen the notch.
- More secure in the T frequency, narrower notch, more effective treatment.
- Less secure in the T frequency, wider notch, less effective treatment.
Q?
Notch Filter?
Just... what? Don't leave us hanging!
I am no audiologist, but I can tell you that this depends very much on the individual damage in the persons cochlea. Some may hear it very little, some may hear it pretty good.
Also, in normal hearing, it's not only one single frequency that is stimulated. Surrounding cells help out too. It's exactly this that notch therapy relies on. It assumes that the surrounding cells, around the dead cell, are healthy. How far off or away these healthy cells are from the damaged cell is what should determine the width of the notch. There is of course no easy way for us to know such thing, since we cannot see the cells.
You don't seem to be deaf at 11800 Hz then do you? If you have a damage at that frequency, the surrounding cells are helping you hear it anyway. This is what may be causing the tinnitus, the recruitment of surrounding cells to do double duty to compensate for the loss of the cell or cells around 11800 Hz.
That audiologist needs education. They are fitting people with hearing aids. They should know about "recruitment".
You are absolutely smarter than that audiologist!
Interesting twist! I have read about this here, before it was released:
http://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/notch-therapy-new-approach-to-18365
This is the first portable, self-contained device that I know of, that relies on the notch therapy theory. In the past, hearing aids have been fitted with noise functions that mask the tinnitus tone. But this may be the first device that subtracts sounds at the tinnitus frequency.
I don't know what to say about it, other than that they are relying on notch therapy, with a twist. The twist is hopefully obvious, so I don't have to explain it. But I have no experience with this.
This has been mentioned before, but in combination with DAW software like Garageband, ProTools, Cubase, Ableton Live, etc.
Is this equalizer all you need? Don't you need the virtual cable tool (Virtual Audio Cable)?
If you read this thread from the first page, you will find that there are about 10 members that have had some success with this, 2 have had bad experience.
Members with good experience:
- rogi
- dan01
- mcauth
- tintin31
- Khoo
- Bill Thomas
- smel
- don dowel
- kevinjohnston1
- Ambassador
- 65vwbus
- George Albertron
- rrf
That's interesting! Can you post a link here later on? Since this relates to notch therapy as well as TMS.
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I have used it and it's currently in my rotation of sound enrichment. Although I do listen to 4K Notched noise I honestly can't tell the difference between the notched version and the un-notched. After so long I am sick of white noise and have been relying heavily on natural sounds of nature for probably 2/3's of the time that I use sound which is virtually constant these days. I am fortunate to have hearing aids with white noise built in so I can listen all day but when home I will stream the Notched version until I get tired of it. At night I've been wearing SleepPhones and listen to rain from my iPhone. The key is to not fully cover your tinnitus. It's a long slow process. The big problem I am having these days are random waves of anxiety, they don't last long but they hit they really screw up my thinking that I AM dealing with this. Makes it hard to resist the Clonazepam but I am convinced staying off the drugs will be best in the long run.
So your T is around 4 kHz?
How long?
Notched?
What is constant?
So that's regular white noise, not notched?
Are you using AudioNotch service for this?
Sorry about all these questions! I just try to get a better picture of the situation. I am considering NMT or ACRN for myself.
One of my files, pre-process:
Post-process:
Question! How deep does the notch need to be?
You can see that at about 4000 Hz it's -68 dB. Is it necessary to kick this into the -90 or -100 dB zone?
It appears that you can improve this notch by repeating the process.
It looks like it goes down all the way. But there is no way to zoom out in this tool or change the scale of the vertical axis.
It says -90 dB on the axis, and -98 dB on cursor. The same reading is -80 dB in Audition.
Third process in Audacity:
Still says -90!
Viewed in Audition:
Says -92 on cursor!
After this quick experimentation I can only conclude that if you are going to use Audacity, make sure to process the file at least twice. Audition and other high quality, and payed software, is better at this and it may not require as much processing to get the desired results. I guess they have better algorithms for this sort of stuff. But Audacity is not bad... not bad at all! If you know what you're doing and what you want to achieve with it.
Post-process:
Question! How deep does the notch need to be?
You can see that at about 4000 Hz it's -68 dB. Is it necessary to kick this into the -90 or -100 dB zone?
It appears that you can improve this notch by repeating the process.
It looks like it goes down all the way. But there is no way to zoom out in this tool or change the scale of the vertical axis.
It says -90 dB on the axis, and -98 dB on cursor. The same reading is -80 dB in Audition.
Third process in Audacity:
Still says -90!
Viewed in Audition:
Says -92 on cursor!
After this quick experimentation I can only conclude that if you are going to use Audacity, make sure to process the file at least twice. Audition and other high quality, and payed software, is better at this and it may not require as much processing to get the desired results. I guess they have better algorithms for this sort of stuff. But Audacity is not bad... not bad at all! If you know what you're doing and what you want to achieve with it.
What do you mean by "150 order"? You mean -150 dB?
Is Butterworth an actual filter inside Cool Edit, or an algorithm/function of the Notch filter? Does it have an equivalent in Audacity?
I can confirm that Audacity comes a bit short when using the Notch filter in there, compared to other software. I compared it to Adobe Audition.
Question! So what's the target attenuation then? Is it -100 dB? Maybe even -150 dB?
Can someone back this up? It makes sense to me, but that's not very scientific. Music is a very powerful thing though, and I plan on using music files instead of noise. Music activates many areas of the brain, such as memory and emotion.
These are very good two points!
- Noise vs. Music
- MEG vs. interview? (TFI questionnaire?)
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Yes, but it's not enabled by default!
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/classic_filters.html
The highest order that can be specified for Butterworth filter in Audacity is 10. That's far from 150 specified in the study.
It is apparent how? I looked at the PLOS article and the PNAS article.
You can't easily achieve this type of notch with regular audio software:
What you are looking at is likely the output from Matlab! Highly advanced and complex software used by scientists and engineers all over the world. My guess is... they used IIR filter functions butter and buttord to specify Butterworth filter algorithm and lowpass and highpass cutoff. In other words they did this programmatically, not by using your everyday audio editor software.
This realization makes me doubt the efficacy of the notch therapy being sold by the many apps and web services. They need to be able to replicate the filtering protocol exactly! I am not so sure they do. They could do it of course, but they would need to do a lot more investigation into this and implement it correctly in code. This is more about code than audio.
By the way, Adobe Audition software that I am using is the successor to Cool Edit. I am not sure it even has a Butterworth filter of any sort. Will have to do some checking.
The closest you can get is to use the Butterworth filter in Audacity. You will find it after you add it. It looks like this:
You can see I have put in 5020 Hz which is approximately the result of 7100 Hz divided by square root of 2. This will give you the lower cutoff. But you can't do a lowpass and highpass at the same time with this. So it's immediately useless! It may be possible to approach it pro grammatically without the GUI part, if there is support for it. I will have to do some checking.
Another pitfall of this filter is that it only allows for 10th order calculations. I finally get the order part! It's math! It's that boring school stuff again, such as equations, polynomials, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_function
Yada, yada, yada... there are some inherent problems with higher order functions that can cause round off errors. I suspect this is why the filter designers left it at 10 as the highest option.
Notch therapy made at home... easier said than done. Properly...
Update:
OK, so I checked and turns out Audition has a whole new set of filters called scientific filters since Adobe CC release (not sure which version).
As for Audacity, there is a plugin available for it that provides proper band stop filtering.
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Effect_Plug-ins#Band_Stop_Filter
I don't think it uses Butterworth algorithm, and probably not a function of 150th order. But it's as close as you can get, using free software.
What do you use as source of the filter protocol specification (that you are trying to replicate "exactly")?
Source? You mean like what files I'm using? Right now I'm just experimenting a bit with music files. I will not be using noise.
No I don't mean the files you are using. I'm talking about the protocol you are trying to implement/replicate. Where do you find its specification? (you claim it's difficult to reproduce, so you must have a document that specifies it somewhere - that's the one I'd like to take a look at)
No, I have no document. I wish I did. I am trying to put the puzzle together by reading different sources on this. The authors were not too specific about the filtering protocol.
I was taught in early school years that one of the criteria for a scientific experiment is that it needs to be reproducible by others. In other words it needs to be very well documented. It seems to me the authors did not give much weight in describing the filtering protocol. It's as if they just assume that it would be understood by reading the few lines above.
Yes, they are professionals, and the article is aimed at other researchers who probably understand what the authors mean. They can read between the lines. But I'm not dumb either... but it makes more sense to put everything in writing, instead of assuming that the reader will understand.
For example, they mention that they used Orbiter 922DH clinical audiometer. This is very specific, and important piece of information. But why is the software less important? If they did use Matlab, as a researcher I would like to know that. I would also like to know what commands and options they used. So that, as a professional researcher (which I'm not), I can replicate the experiment properly without deviation and guesswork. It just makes sense... being a scientist and all that...
I know they (researchers) have been playing around with this ever since that Italian paper on Windowed Sound Therapy came out.
I wonder if this has anything to do with it...
So... some of the tools or options that have been suggested earlier:
It's not enough to just achieve a certain attenuation, you need the right width and curvature in the spectrum. That is if you want to properly replicate the research they did.
I don't want to claim that doing it exactly right will give you better results. But if you want to be scientific about it, that's what you need to do.
The order number is what gives the filter that steep slope. This is what the first 5 order slopes look like:
The steep slope is not the only quality of this filter. More on the science behind Butterworth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterworth_filter
It's not without reason that Adobe grouped this filter in the category "scientific filter".
- Notch filter
- Equalizer
- Band stop filter
- Butterworth
It's not enough to just achieve a certain attenuation, you need the right width and curvature in the spectrum. That is if you want to properly replicate the research they did.
I don't want to claim that doing it exactly right will give you better results. But if you want to be scientific about it, that's what you need to do.
The order number is what gives the filter that steep slope. This is what the first 5 order slopes look like:
The steep slope is not the only quality of this filter. More on the science behind Butterworth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterworth_filter
It's not without reason that Adobe grouped this filter in the category "scientific filter".
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