Have any tips for mixing for people with tinnitus (sensitive ears)?

[Winstontaneous]

My suggestions based on wild guesses: the pitches we hear in our tinnitus are NOT the exact frequencies we are missing. They may be caused by less intuitive neurological functions.

I agree with this. I have mild tinnitus from loud noises/music, and I've had the pitches change abruptly over time. Also, I find tension in the head/face/jaw/neck/shoulders increases the ringing, and getting a good massage or cracking the right vertebrae can markedly decrease it. Becoming aware of the amount of tension I used to hold in my jaw was really a life-changing experience.

As Jace-BEOS notes, tender flowers like us who are sensitive to sound tune in to every little noise, so it's partly a perceptual thing. I think we can actually hear some of the inner workings of our nervous system. As John Cage wrote:

Code: Select all

It     was     after     I     got     to     Boston
             that     I     went     into     the
anechoic     chamber               at     Harvard
 University.                                        
Anybody     who     knows     me               knows
   this     story.
   I     am     constantly     telling     it.
                                 Anyway,
              in     that     silent     room,
                     I     heard     two     sounds,
                            one     high               and
    one     low.                                        
Afterward     I     asked     the     engineer     in
    charge               why,     if     the     room
    was     so     silent,
 I     had     heard     two     sounds.
                           He     said,
             “Describe     them.”               I     
did.                                         He     said,
                              “The     high     one
          was     your     nervous     system
        in     operation.
            The     low     one                was
your     blood                 in      circulation.”

[Gonga]

My best mixing is done at the lowest possible volumes. Whether using headphones or speakers, I begin mixing at the lowest volume. If it sounds good that way, it will only sound better when louder. This also spares my ears.

[sharke]

For me the most irritating sounds for my tinnitus are unfiltered sawtooth waves. I think they're probably irritating to most people, but if you have tinnitus they're particularly bad. What really annoys me is when I watch a synth tutorial video, especially some of those on Groove3, and not only do they use bare sawtooth waves for most of their examples but they also play them considerably louder than the narrator's voice. I was watching a Massive tutorial the other day and I had to stop it because every time the guy played a sound my ears started ringing.

I feel the connection between tinnitus and neck/jaw tension as well. If I jut out my lower jaw and tense it, my tinnitus gets much louder. However when resting, my jaw doesn't feel tense at all. So I don't think muscle tension accounts for a lot of my tinnitus, maybe a little bit. I know what did it. It was prolonged exposure to noise in my late teens/early 20's.

First of all I went to quite a few metal gigs in my teens. Metallica, Dio etc...and I remember quite severe deafness for the whole evening after them. It's scandalous the extent to which bands are allowed to damage people's hearing like that. Way too loud. Then I was in a thrash metal band...a Sunday afternoon of standing next to a Marshall stack and a thrash drummer was enough to set my ears ringing for a day afterwards. Then into my late teens and early 20's it was clubs and raves. I suspect the drugs had something to do with it as well, I'm pretty sure you can get brain damage related tinnitus from "fun" amounts of speed, E, acid etc. And the raves...12 hours of constant acid trance blasting at biblical volumes in a warehouse, well I'm pretty sure a lot of my tinnitus consists of the sum total of all of these frequencies burned on my eardrum

Bottom line, I wish I had looked after my ears and worn protection at these events. I still have pretty good hearing considering I'm over 40 and abused the cr@p out of it (I can hear good up to around 16K). But to think that I could be tinnitus free if only I'd been careful...oh well. Most people I know of my age group have it too.

[Sendy]

My best mixing is done at the lowest possible volumes. Whether using headphones or speakers, I begin mixing at the lowest volume. If it sounds good that way, it will only sound better when louder. This also spares my ears.

Good point. During the mixing process, if I find the need to keep turning it up higher and higher, that sets off alarm bells that my mixing is currently ineffective.

Though once I've mixed at a normal listening level, I like to crank the mix up real loud, and mix from that perspective in brief bursts, notching away the harshest sounds and rebalancing levels slightly. During this phase I'm almost always cutting HF content, speach-range midrange and turning down highhat tracks

I love it when music is played loud and it just hugs your ears, with some frequencies maybe harsher than others, but none of them really painful. There's nothing worse than playing a track loud and having to turn it down because of some painful development mid-song

By far the worst offender for this kind of thing is Squarepusher's Tetra-sync. About two thirds of the way in he activates a ringmodulator effect on the bass guitar, and it sounds about three times louder than anything else in the track, it's unlistenable at high volume which is a shame because the rest of the track sounds great loud.

[Gonga]

Yes, I forgot to mention that at the lower volumes you will tend to accentuate the bass and treble frequencies a tad (or perhaps de-emphasize the mid-range). So you have to do a final mix and "normal" volumes. Although my ears prefer accentuated bass and treble I suppose (I'm giving my age away here - 55).

I have always wondered why compression isn't a more standard feature of mp3 players, car stereos, SONOS systems, computer audio chips, TVs, etc. It would be great to have for listening to classical music while cooking dinner with the cabinet fan on

[camsr]

Well they have EQ's, sometimes, usually very simple graphic EQ.

It's probably they don't want to confuse the general public with things only audio engineers really understand.

[JCJR]

Dunno much about it, as usual on everything. I've had some tinnitus since childhood, but doesn't seem any worse now than then. Around the age of 40 snare drums became painful on stage and began religiously wearing etymotic earplugs, which have a decently flat frequency response. I wear plugs or muffs for anything loud. Concerts, power tools, etc.

http://www.etymotic.com/hp/er20.html
Cheap and good. Possibly if you wear them "as much as practical" day to day, it might improve your tolerance of music. Dunno.

When I get a spare dollar or two, would like to get some of the new etymotic electronic plugs. Either unity gain or slight boost on quiet sounds with smooth compression over a certain threshold. I could wear something like this thru much of the day if need be. When I played nightly so many years, the ER-15 or ER-20 passive plugs didn't interfere with playing at all, but they attenuated audio "just enough" that it was difficult to hear quiet conversations with singers or musicians between songs. The electronic plugs would fix that problem.
http://www.etymotic.com/hp/mp915.html

The worst tinnitus horror story I've personally seen-- A friend paid his way to a masters in music playing loud rock'n'roll clubs. I sat in on his gigs a couple of times and the stage volume was stunning loud. Incredibly louder than gigs I would play. Insane loud.

So right after he graduated, he came down with tinnitus symptoms not a mere ringing of the ears, but he described it as loud car horns blaring for hours. He had to wear hearing protection just to go outside and tolerate street sounds, and had to wear hearing protection even to play acoustic piano. Had to quit gigging, intolerable even with hearing protection.

It took him several years to begin to recover, but he must have at least partially recovered as he has been able to teach college music and recording technology courses for the last two or three decades. As best I know his main treatment was to protect the ears near 24/7 for a long time, which is why I speculate that perhaps the strategy would work.

[Gonga]

Well they have EQ's, sometimes, usually very simple graphic EQ.

It's probably they don't want to confuse the general public with things only audio engineers really understand.

Yup, that could be. But if there were a simple button called "compress" that was set for a standard 4 to 1 ratio or so, it would be great for us folks who like old-fashioned classical, jazz and other music that has some dynamics left to it. It would be killer in the car, the kitchen, at work, or anywhere the noise background drowns out the soft passages, no?

[fandango]

I seem to get 2 forms of tinnitus.

One that appeared lately is in the right ear only and sounds a bit like a TV with the display off but on 'standby mode'. A pitch so high it's not really identifiable as a distinct note.

The other (which my father also has), is a rushing sound (like ocean waves breaking on a beach) which actually builds into a crescendo when you concentrate on it. So with a bit of mental training I can pretend I'm by the seaside...

I shouldn't complain though, as my hearing is still incredibly sensitive (aforementioned TVs, electrical items charging, LEDs on some devices, adapters, etc. are distinctly audible to me... so much so I have to switch them off).

Definite connection with the jaw though. As mentioned, if I stress my jaw the tinnitus in the right ear is amplified. My jaw doesn't quite 'fit' (not that anyone would notice... I hope!), and clicks awkwardly. Suspect it's affecting the inner ear.

[Davias]

Got tinnitus too, since approx 7 months (that made me drop from KVR and making music on a regular basis ).

I try to relax my ear and I saw that taking ginko bilboa can help reduce the sound. And also a medicine called Piracetam from my doctor, less effective than the ginko but why not.

At first it was loud enough that I was hearing it clearly in my bedroom, but with some music in background it could more or less blend that pitch. Now after 7 months it is still here but much more attenuated. If I stay enough time in a quiet place and I relax, it gradually vanish, maybe brain is accustomed ? But if I hear loud music or sound, it instantly get louder.

Also I've searched a little bit on the net (where I found about the ginko) and I saw two new studies that bring good promises for the future : there is an experimental therapy where they put electrodes inside your throat in order to stimulate the auditive nerve sounds scary, but why not ?
Another study was suggesting that MDMA can help, if not cure, to relieve the tinnitus symptoms, must try that

Hope this thread can help people who suffer from this annoying problem.

[sharke]

I wouldn't take any kind of recreational drug to help with tinnitus. I can believe that MDMA might help a person cope with the symptoms of tinnitus while they're on it, but I'm not convinced that such drugs don't potentially cause the kind of brain damage that can make tinnitus worse, especially with prolonged use. I took a lot of E, speed, acid etc in the early 90's, and one thing I do remember is that even if we hadn't been in a loud environment, I would get a pretty bad ringing in my ears lying in bed on the comedown. I remember feeling at the time that this was a reaction to the hammering my brain had taken on the drug. Of course I can't prove that, but I'm still cautious of a connection between drugs and tinnitus. The ringing I used to get after drugs was similar to the ringing you get when you get banged hard on the head.

[Jace-BeOS]

Yeah, avoid drugs. Most are ototoxic. Ginkgo biloba seems associated to helping against cancer treatment's ototoxicity, but I'm not seeing any generic protection or healing properties mentioned. I would be wary of any stimulants.

[IrionDaRonin]

Use visual plugins, get accustomed to those, and level down the volume.

I have Tinnitus too since years, and i thought it was something normal, lol...
I'm acustomed to it.

Good luck.

[camsr]

Well they have EQ's, sometimes, usually very simple graphic EQ.

It's probably they don't want to confuse the general public with things only audio engineers really understand.

Yup, that could be. But if there were a simple button called "compress" that was set for a standard 4 to 1 ratio or so, it would be great for us folks who like old-fashioned classical, jazz and other music that has some dynamics left to it. It would be killer in the car, the kitchen, at work, or anywhere the noise background drowns out the soft passages, no?

Yeah I do agree, but it seems the manufacturers don't. You'll be lucky to even find these features in high-end home theater equipment, much less computer speakers or car stereos. I would think mobile devices could easily incorporate these items using software.

[Wavetone]

Got tinnitus since the early years, I found a relief using the cotton wool pads or plugs for ears during mixing or production, it helps me a lot against ear fatigue and headaches.