Tinnitus Frequency Test: Find Your Tinnitus Pitch

Tuning an external tone by ear until it matches the pitch of your tinnitus. It's a basic step in a full audiology evaluation, and it gives you and a clinician a shared description of what you hear: “a tone around 6,000 Hz” says more than “a high ringing”. It is also the input notched sound therapy needs, which is why this tool can go on to generate one.

A study comparing self-administered, computer-based tone matching to a conventional clinical audiometric procedure found a strong correlation between the two (r = 0.793), with roughly 70% of subjects matching within half an octave of the clinical result. Octave confusion — settling on a tone an octave above or below the real pitch — was a significant factor in where the two methods disagreed, which is why the tool has octave buttons.

Tone matching also has known variability within a single clinical session, which is part of why that correlation with a self-administered method is worth knowing rather than assuming. A second attempt on another day is a fair check on the first.

Once you have a match, the tool can play broadband sound with a narrow band removed at your tinnitus frequency. That is the idea behind notched sound therapy: starve the overactive frequency region of input while its neighbours keep firing, and hope the region quietens. The removed band in published protocols spans roughly half an octave to a full octave, wide enough that an approximate match falls within it.

Treat it as an experiment, not a treatment. The trials that compare notched music with ordinary music mostly find no difference; the notched sound therapy article sets them out one by one.

Notched sound therapy was introduced in a small randomized trial that found reduced tinnitus loudness and reduced tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity after 12 months of regular listening. It had eight people in the treatment group and eight in a placebo group, which is worth knowing before reading too much into it on its own.

A larger double-blind randomized controlled trial in 104 patients found no statistically significant difference between personalized notched music and ordinary, non-notched music at 1, 3, and 6 months, measured on standard tinnitus handicap and distress scales. Two separate 2024 systematic reviews and meta-analyses reached the same conclusion: no significant effect on tinnitus handicap, and in the one that pooled 99 people on notched music against 109 on ordinary music, no difference between them at all. Neither review was able to pool the loudness data — that signal comes from individual trials, not from the meta-analyses.

A third meta-analysis, published in 2025 and pooling 14 trials, did find notched music ahead of conventional music therapy at three months. Its confidence interval for the handicap score ran from −17.01 to −0.23 points, an upper end that is effectively zero.

In plain terms: this may make your tinnitus sound quieter to you, but the evidence doesn't show it reliably reduces how much tinnitus bothers you day to day, and the comparisons against ordinary music mostly find no advantage for the notch. The benefit may come from the listening rather than the gap in it.

Adjust the tone until it's as close as you can get to your tinnitus pitch, check an octave either side, then confirm the match. The frequency is the result. The notched sound after it is there if you want to try it, at a low volume, and skipping it is an equally reasonable choice.

• Take the frequency to an appointment. It is a useful description of what you hear; a first audiology appointment is where it is measured properly, alongside your hearing.
• If you want sound for relief, the sound library has ordinary masking sounds, and sound therapy for tinnitus sets out what the evidence does and does not support.
• If the tinnitus went quiet for a moment after the tone stopped, that has a name: residual inhibition.

It is not a substitute for a real audiology evaluation, especially if your tinnitus is new, one-sided, pulsatile, or came on suddenly — see your first audiology appointment for what that evaluation involves.