Tinnitus Pro : Music Therapy

Medical | Music

iOS

Tinnitus Pro Music Therapy is the result of scientific research undertaken by Okamoto, Stracke, Stoll and Pantev at the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis and the Department of Otorhinolaryngology in Muenster, Germany. The research has been endorsed by the Tinnitus Research Initiative.

Reduce your tinnitus while listening to your music; the scientific way!

Tinnitus Pro is an easy-to-use app to help you reduce the loudness of your tinnitus tone while listening to your own iTunes music.


HOW DOES THIS APP WORK?
Tinnitus Pro Music Therapy is a treatment aimed at reducing the loudness of tinnitus through listening to individually tailored music. This works by stripping out the frequencies in music that correspond to an individual’s tinnitus frequency. The app identifies a one-octave band around the patient’s tinnitus frequency and removes this swath of frequencies from the music’s energy spectrum. After one year of listening to this “notched” music, patients have reported a significant reduction in the loudness of ringing compared to a group of tinnitus patients who listened to music in which frequencies were randomly removed.

THE THEORY BEHIND THE APP
Little is known about the mechanisms of tinnitus, but recent studies have shown it may be caused by maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization. In this situation, neurons in the auditory cortex are deprived of normal electrical input because of hearing loss.
Yet the neurons don't become inactive. Instead, they are "rewired" so that they are no longer excited by the frequencies they were originally tuned to. They do, however, become sensitive to neighboring frequencies. That synchronized spontaneous neural activity may lead to tinnitus.
Previous research has shown that this kind of cortical reorganization can be modified by behavioral training.

This app reduces the loudness of patients' tinnitus by exposing them to music of their choice which is modified, or "notched", to contain no energy in the same frequency range as the patient's tinnitus.
The idea behind this therapy is that the notched music doesn't stimulate the cortical area corresponding to the tinnitus frequency, but it still excites surrounding neurons. Therefore, the neurons that aren't stimulated are suppressed via lateral inhibitory inputs originating from surrounding neurons.
The notched music could also have induced synaptic or cellular plasticity mechanisms.

FEATURES
- Determination of tinnitus frequency
- Fine slider for exact frequency finding
- White-, Pink- and Browne Noise audio files included
- Time line; a perfect solution to follow the therapy results
- User friendly interface
- Share by twitter
- and much more...

DOES IT REALLY HELP ME?
The research shows that the therapy has significant positive results, we can not guarantee that the therapy will work for specific cases. Please go to http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1207 to read the full scientific publication.

NEVER DISREGARD PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL ADVICE OR DELAY SEEKING MEDICAL TREATMENT BECAUSE OF SOMETHING YOU HAVE READ ON OR ACCESSED THROUGH THIS APP.