NighthumHow to find the pitch of your tinnitus
A pitch match is you comparing your own ringing against a tone you can control, and stopping when the two sound like the same thing. It is subjective by definition, it takes a few minutes, and done carefully it gives you a number that makes every sound decision afterwards less of a guess.
Two things to be clear about before you start. This is not a hearing test and it will not tell you anything about your hearing — that requires an audiologist and proper equipment. And a pitch match is a report of a perception, so it will wobble. The aim is a reliable estimate, not a laboratory figure.
Before you begin
Find a quiet room and a few minutes when nobody will interrupt you. Use headphones rather than a speaker: a speaker puts the room's own resonances in the way, and you want as little between you and the tone as possible. Over-ear headphones are the easiest to be comfortable in, but decent in-ear ones work fine.
Most importantly, set the volume before you set the pitch. Turn it down until you can only just hear the tone. A loud tone will simply cover your tinnitus, and you cannot compare two sounds when one of them has vanished. Quiet also protects your ears, which is not a small consideration when you are deliberately playing tones into them.
The steps
Set up the room and the volume
Sit down, headphones on, volume all the way down before anything plays. Bring it up slowly until the tone is just audible against your ringing — roughly at the level where you would say it is present rather than obvious. If at any point the tone is uncomfortable, it is far too loud.
Decide which sound you are matching
Plenty of people hear more than one thing: a high tone in one ear and a lower hiss in the other, or a tone that sits on top of a broader rushing sound. Listen for half a minute and pick the single most prominent one. Note which ear it is clearest in and match that one. You can always come back and match a second sound later; trying to match a composite at once produces nothing usable.
If what you hear is not a tone at all — a hiss, a rush, a crackle, a sound with no clear pitch — a pure-tone match may never feel right. Skip to the section below on noise-like tinnitus.
Find the rough region before the exact pitch
This is where most attempts go wrong: people start sweeping in tiny increments from the bottom and get lost within seconds. Instead, jump. Play a tone, then one roughly an octave above it, then another. For each one ask a single question — is this higher or lower than my ringing? — and nothing else.
You are only trying to identify the band, in the same way you would find a chapter before you find a page. Two or three jumps usually gets you there.
Narrow it down inside that region
Now sweep slowly within that band in small steps, still asking only higher or lower. What you are listening for is not "the same note" in a musical sense. It is the moment the tone stops standing apart from your tinnitus and starts to merge with it, so that you cannot easily say which sound is which.
Move past the point that seems right, then come back to it from the other side. Approaching a match from both directions is far more reliable than creeping up on it once.
Check the octave above and below
Do not skip this one. Octave confusion is the single most common error in tinnitus pitch matching, and it happens because a tone and the same tone an octave away genuinely can sound like a match when you are comparing against an internal sound. Take your candidate, then deliberately compare it against the tone an octave higher and the tone an octave lower, back and forth.
Ask which of the three sits most exactly on your ringing. It is common for people to settle on a pitch lower than the true one on the first pass, so give the higher option a genuine hearing rather than dismissing it.
Confirm by toggling the tone on and off
With your best candidate playing, switch it on and off several times. A good match has a characteristic feel: when the tone is on, your tinnitus seems to disappear into it; when the tone stops, the ringing reappears, sometimes with a small jolt. A poor match feels like two sounds in the room, one of which you just turned off.
If you get the two-sounds feeling, go back a step and sweep again. It is worth a second pass.
Write it down and repeat on another day
Note the frequency you landed on and the ear. Then, on a different day and preferably at a different time, do the whole thing again without looking at your first answer. Two independent attempts that land close together mean you have a usable estimate. If they are far apart, run a third and take the middle, and treat the region rather than the exact figure as the answer.
Why the number moves, and why that is fine
Your reported pitch can shift between sessions, sometimes noticeably. Fatigue, how quiet the room is, the volume you used, how long you spent, and how the tinnitus happens to be behaving that day all feed into it. This is normal for any judgement made against an internal reference, and it is exactly why the repeat in step 7 exists.
For practical purposes the region matters more than the decimal. A sound shaped for the neighbourhood of your pitch will still be shaped for it if you are a little off. Being an octave off is a different matter, which is why step 5 gets its own place.
If your tinnitus is not a tone
Hissing, rushing, static, cicada-like or crackling tinnitus does not have one pitch to find, and forcing a pure-tone match will only frustrate you. A more useful approach is to work out which broad band it occupies — is it up in the region of a kettle and cymbals, or lower down towards a rush of air? — and match a filtered band of noise rather than a tone. You will get a range instead of a number, and a range is still enough to choose sensible sound with.
The same goes for tinnitus that changes character through the day. Match it when it is most typical, not at its worst.
What to do with the number
Knowing your approximate pitch changes what sound you reach for. Broadband noise treats all frequencies alike, so some of what it plays lands directly on your tinnitus and some of it is doing nothing for you. Once you know the region, you can pick or shape sound that sits around your pitch rather than on it — which is the whole idea behind notched sound, and the subject of the next piece.
It also gives you something concrete to bring to an audiologist, who can do a proper measurement and put it alongside an actual hearing test.
A pitch match is your own report of what you hear. It is not a hearing test, it diagnoses nothing, and this article is general information rather than medical advice. Keep every tone comfortably quiet — louder is never better. If your tinnitus is sudden, in one ear only, pulsing in time with your heartbeat, or accompanied by hearing loss, dizziness or pain, it is worth getting checked by an audiologist or a doctor.
Read next
- Masking, white noise and notched sound: what the difference actually is — what to do with the pitch once you have it.
- Why tinnitus sounds louder at night — the four things that change after dark.
- How to use a sleep timer and layered sound without waking yourself — building the mix your notched sound sits in.
- How to keep a tinnitus diary that actually shows change — checking a pitch match against weeks of your own numbers.
- What Nighthum does — it walks you through this match in about a minute, then plays masking sound with an octave notched out around the result. Not on the App Store yet; the waitlist is on the home page.