Nighthum
The Quiet Room

Masking, white noise and notched sound: what the difference actually is

Published · about 7 minutes

Search for sound and tinnitus and you get four or five words used as though they mean the same thing. They do not. They describe different things being done to the sound, with different aims, and each of them fails in its own particular way. Knowing which is which saves you from buying the wrong solution to your problem.

One framing to keep in mind throughout: sound approaches are about how you get through the hours, and about giving your brain less reason to keep promoting the ringing. None of them removes tinnitus. Anything that promises to is overselling.

Approach one

Total masking

Playing a sound loud and broad enough that your tinnitus is completely covered. You cannot hear the ringing while it plays, because something louder has taken its place across the frequencies it occupies.

The appeal is obvious and immediate: it is the only approach that offers actual silence from the ringing, on demand. For a bad spike, twenty minutes of relief can be worth a great deal.

Where it falls short

It requires volume, and volume all day or all night is a real risk to your hearing — the last thing you want to be trading away. It is also all-or-nothing: the moment you switch it off, the ringing is back at full strength, and by contrast with the silence it can seem worse for a while. And because it removes the tinnitus rather than teaching you to live alongside it, it does nothing to make the quiet parts of your day easier. Used constantly it can become something you depend on rather than something you use.

Approach two

Partial masking, or sound enrichment

Deliberately keeping the sound below your tinnitus, so you can still hear both. The aim is not to cover the ringing but to give it company: to raise the background so the tinnitus is no longer the only thing in an empty field, which is exactly the problem a quiet bedroom creates.

This is the approach most sound therapy in a clinical setting is built around, and it is the one that matches how habituation is generally understood to work — a signal your brain stops promoting because it has stopped being remarkable. It is quiet, so it is safe for long periods, and it can run all evening.

Where it falls short

It is slow and it is undramatic. Nothing happens on the first night. It asks you to accept that you can still hear your tinnitus, which is a hard sell when what you want is for it to stop. It also demands consistency over weeks, and people abandon it long before that because it does not feel like it is doing anything. For someone in acute distress it can seem insultingly mild.

Approach three

White, pink and brown noise

These are not therapies; they are shapes of sound, and the difference between them is only where the energy sits. White noise spreads energy evenly across frequencies and comes out sounding hissy and bright. Pink noise puts more energy in the lower frequencies and sounds more like steady rain. Brown noise is weighted lower still and sounds like a distant waterfall or heavy surf.

All three are easy to find, cost nothing, and work as sound enrichment. Preference here is genuinely personal, and it is worth trying all three rather than assuming the one everyone recommends is the one for you. Natural sounds — rain, wind, surf — do a similar job with more variation to listen to.

Where it falls short

They are indiscriminate. Broadband noise puts sound everywhere, which means part of it is landing right on top of your tinnitus frequency and part of it is landing somewhere irrelevant to you. If your tinnitus is a high tone, brown noise may never seem to reach it, no matter how far you turn it up — the energy is in the wrong place. White noise reaches it, but by covering it, which drags you back towards the volume problem. And a flat, unchanging hiss is, for some people, its own kind of irritating.

Approach four

Notched sound

Take a broadband sound, find the frequency of the person's tinnitus, and remove a band of frequencies around it — typically about an octave wide — before playing it. The result is a sound with a hole cut in it exactly where the ringing lives.

The reasoning is that the sound then sits around your tinnitus rather than on it. You are not covering the ringing, so you are not pushing the volume up; you are filling in everything except the region it occupies. In practice it often feels different from plain noise in a specific way: the ringing seems to sit under the sound rather than in front of it. Whether that is worth more to you than plain enrichment is something only listening will tell you.

Where it falls short

It depends entirely on the pitch estimate, which is your own subjective report and can wobble from day to day. Get the octave wrong and the notch is cut in the wrong place, which is worse than not notching at all. It only really makes sense for tonal tinnitus: if what you hear is a hiss with no clear pitch, there is no single frequency to notch around. Notching also removes energy, so a heavily notched sound is a slightly thinner sound. And, like every other approach here, it does nothing while it is switched off.

So which one

A reasonable way to sort it out:

Two honest caveats

First, none of this is settled or one-size-fits-all. Different approaches suit different people, evidence varies in strength between them, and what someone else swears by may do nothing for you. Be suspicious of anyone — including anyone selling something — who describes a sound approach as a cure or a treatment.

Second, the thing worth tracking is not only loudness. How loud your tinnitus seems and how much it bothers you are two different measurements, and they move independently. Writing both down each day, over weeks, tends to be more revealing than either one alone: the gap opening between the two lines is often the first sign that something is changing, even when the ringing itself has not.

Please read

This is general information, not medical advice. Sound approaches do not diagnose, treat or cure tinnitus, and Nighthum is a sound and diary tool rather than a medical device. Keep every sound comfortably quiet; louder is not more effective. If your tinnitus is sudden, in one ear only, pulsing with your heartbeat, or comes with hearing loss, dizziness or pain, it is worth getting checked by an audiologist or a doctor.