Sound enrichment, not silence

Many people with tinnitus retreat into silence — quiet rooms, no music, headphones with active noise cancellation. It feels protective. It is the opposite.

Silence pushes the auditory cortex to crank up its internal gain to find something to listen to. Tinnitus is what it finds. Habituation, by contrast, requires a small amount of varied, neutral sound around you most of the time.

It is not loud. The target is around ten decibels below your tinnitus — enough to give the auditory system company, not enough to drown the sound out. Drowning it out feels good in the moment and slows habituation, because the brain never gets the practice of co-existing with the perception.

Real-world enrichment is best: an open window, a fan, soft music, a quiet café. When those are not available, HushOS soundscapes work the same way. Rain, brown noise, café murmur, ocean — variety helps more than a single source.

Two specific therapies use sound differently. Notched audio plays music with a one-octave band around your tinnitus pitch removed, reducing the cortical neurons that fire at that frequency. Acoustic coordinated reset plays short tone sequences just around the pitch to desynchronise their firing.

Both are inside HushOS. Forty-five minutes a day of either, alongside the general enrichment above, is a reasonable target. Pick one and stick to it for at least eight weeks.