Tinnitus Tailor [iPhone]

Create personal sounds to soothe your Tinnitus.

You can use it with headphones or speakers and create separate profiles for them, and create different profiles for day or night.

Based on research conducted at the University of Glasgow and the University of Nottingham with support from the Medical Research Council (MRC).

Story of Tinnitus Tailor

It all started with a research project between the University of Glasgow and the Institute of Hearing Research (IHR). At this point Bernd Porr and Owen Brimijoin were teaching psychology of perception at the University of Glasgow and became interested in how people imagine sounds. Emily Tilbury, then a student at the School of Engineering, selected this project as her BEng thesis. Under the guidance of Owen, Emily then wrote software to test the hypothesis. Then she then ran experiments where she played random noise to subjects and asked them to press a button whenever they hear either "a" or "e". When combining the responses they found that the sounds just before each response resembled on average either "a" or "e" respectively, even though we never actually put an "a" or "e" sound in the noise. Thus they found an objective way to determine how people imagine sounds:

Brimijoin, Owen, Akeroyd, Michael, Tilbury, Emily, and Porr, Bernd (2013) The internal representation of vowel spectra investigated using behavioral response-triggered averaging. JASA Express Letters. Volume 133, Issue 2, pp. EL118-EL122 (2013).

At this point the idea was born that one could invert this idea and ask a tinnitus sufferer to press a button whenever their tinnitus perception is reduced while listening to different sounds. Owen rewrote our vowel software for this purpose and then it was tested positively with tinnitus sufferers. Bernd Porr then decided to turn that idea into a mobile phone app. He became part time at the University of Glasgow and dedicated half of his time writing Tinnitus Tailor.