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Having a strange issue with my hearing recently

#21
In the aftermath of developing tinnitus I experienced a period of extreme sensitivities to a variety of noises diagnosed as hyperacusis. Walking the dog on a busy street was overwhelming and I began traveling with earplugs to make sure I was prepared. Audiology showed a sharp notch in my hearing in the upper registers - likely the range of an extremely loud guitarist I used to play with. I use earplugs for all gigs now but haven't found anything for the tinnitus though at the moment I am trying red light therapy. Too early to tell if its working.
 
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#22
monsterthompson said:
Audiology was in the cards for me when I had some odd hearing issues a few years back. Like the OP, I expected to have high frequencies fade out with age. Nope. I lost bass. Not sure if it was that way for years and I din’t realize it, or if something triggered the issues.
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I think I know the problem here, someone wired up the capacitor in your internal tone circuit in series rather than in parallel.

monsterthompson said:
First issue was bass loss. I noticed it when my headphones seemed to have a poor balance of bass on one side. I flipped them around and the issue was still on the same ear, so it wasn’t the headphones. I took a sine wave in my DAW and ran a sweep from 20-20k and found one ear quit hearing lows before the other.

Second issue was an odd echo, particularly at high mids and up. I thought I had odd reflections echoing in my room watching TV. Nope. The doc said it was a brain trick. The brain was glitching trying to process the Left and Right ears “hearing” different frequency ranges. The faux echos eventually went away.

I’m pretty cautious about sound levels these days.

Definitely get some professional feedback an analysis. The TB crew has some knowledge and experience, but we aren’t doctors (most of us) and we can’t test your hearing. We can sympathize though. Being a musician with ear issues is a drag.
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Yep, the referral to audiology is in and I'm definitely going to follow through on that as well as an ENT visit. I appreciate all the advice here but mainly I just wanted to vent. Ive already dealt with my hands not cooperating in the past couple of years, now the ears are going too. And really I dont have anyone to blame but myself for it, I didnt use ear protection back when I was young and (mostly) invincible.
 
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#26
Isaac_James said:
Something unusual has happened to my hearing over the past few days. A little background context first - back in January I had an infection in my left ear, which I was able to treat (mostly) with antibiotics. I've continued to have some unusual pressure behind that ear though.

Over the weekend I noticed that some sounds in the high frequency range are EXTREMELY uncomfortable to me now. I've always been sensitive to high frequencies, but now something like putting away dishes makes me wince just from the sound of plates and glasses clinking together. My tinnitus (which I've had for years and years) also sems more pronounced now. I went in to see my doctor this morning, but he didn't see or feel anything concerning in or around my ears. He did put in a referral to audiology, so hopefully I'll get some more answers there. I'm really puzzled about what's going on, usually people lose higher frequency hearing as they age. The only thing I can think of is that the infection knocked out a lot of that high frequency, and I got used to it over the last couple of months, and now that it's healing back to normal it suddenly seems much sharper than before. But that's just a wild guess.

For now I'm dealing with it by wearing my wireless over the ear headphones throughout the day, which helps block out noise even when they're turned off.
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Try flushing your sinuses.
I had a similar experience with splitting headaches preceeded by extreme sensitivity to high frequencies. Flushing out my sinuses helped quite a bit.
 
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#27
I have constant ‘self generated noise’. I only notice it if I think about it, but every now and then it just stops, completely, for a few seconds and everything is completely silent. It’s a strange experience, happens once or twice a month. When it comes back it’s like someone turning up a hifi gradually from zero over the course of a second or so.
I imagine part of my brain is rebooting. I hope it’s not serious!
 
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#28
I would definitely visit an ear nose and throat doctor and have it well examined to rule out an abscess or similar in the ear or bone.

An infection of the inner ear or the surrounding bones (mastoid) cannot be treated with any antibiotic, which must be selected according to the suspected or detected germs.
 
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#33
Isaac_James said:
I'll get in as soon as I can, believe me. Might still take a couple of months to schedule anything. The state of health care in my area is pretty dire right now, I'm sorry to say.
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Yep, when I was dealing with referrals from a Portland hospital last summer I had to jump through way too many extra hoops to get urgently needed specialist care. Some were booked a solid year out, even.
 
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#34
From what I’ve been able to read, tinnitus is not fully understood. But, in a simple manner, we are born with a huge number of hair cells in the inner ear. Each hair cell is ‘tuned’ to a certain frequency. It is possible in your case that your original group of cells, tuned to certain frequencies, got damaged. To remedy, your ear recruited other hair cells to compensate for your loss of certain frequencies. You may be hearing sounds that had become familiar to you over the years in a new way because of this compensation. Now, over time, you will probably become familiar with these new sounds.
I’m not a medical expert, and I welcome being corrected.
 
#35
bass player 53 said:
From what I’ve been able to read, tinnitus is not fully understood. But, in a simple manner, we are born with a huge number of hair cells in the inner ear. Each hair cell is ‘tuned’ to a certain frequency. It is possible in your case that your original group of cells, tuned to certain frequencies, got damaged. To remedy, your ear recruited other hair cells to compensate for your loss of certain frequencies. You may be hearing sounds that had become familiar to you over the years in a new way because of this compensation. Now, over time, you will probably become familiar with these new sounds.
I’m not a medical expert, and I welcome being corrected.
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What I've read is that when cilia die, the brain notices the missing frequencies and supplies them, even when inappropriate.

I did a simple test when my tinnitus was at its worst (before I was fitted with hearing aids), which seemed to confirm this hypothesis:

In order to identify the frequencies at which my tinnitus was the most annoying, I listened to the swept output of a frequency generator.

As I stumbled upon each of the three frequencies at which my tinnitus was the most pronounced, the tinnitus ringing stopped entirely.

The absence of ringing when each frequency was generated in my headphones apparently placated my brain, and it temporarily ceased generating the missing frequencies on its own.

Although my account is clearly anecdotal, I am very relieved that, since obtaining hearing aids, my tinnitus has been a non-issue. :)
 
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#37
DrBnz said:
Tinnitus - had it my whole life. BUT.... if/when my blood pressure gets up a bit too high, it gets louder. At times it even sounds like birds chirping. So check your BP now.... If it's high, deal with that immediately.... Mine comes and goes..... So does my High BP
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how do you know whether hbp is causing your tinnitus to get louder or whether tinnitus is causing your hbp?

I've had intermittent hearing issues that seem to be related to my back of all things, no tinnitus tho.
 
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