What the research does and doesn’t show

Sleep problems are common among people who are bothered by tinnitus. The VA/DoD patient summary lists difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep among the ways tinnitus affects daily life, alongside difficulty concentrating and feeling irritable, anxious, or low.[1]

Using sound is a common part of how people manage tinnitus, and it appears in formal guidance. The VA/DoD patient summary suggests asking your provider about ways to use sound — music, white noise, or nature sounds — to feel comfortable and relaxed.[1] NICE describes sound enrichment as something used either as a self-help technique or as one component of a broader tinnitus management programme supported by a healthcare professional.[2]

The evidence is not strong enough to say any one sound-based approach is better than another. The Cochrane review of sound-based approaches for tinnitus concluded there is no evidence supporting superiority over a waiting list, placebo, or education and information with no device, and insufficient evidence to place any one option above the others. It graded the certainty of the evidence as low.[3]

Results for notched sound specifically are mixed across studies. Some trials have reported reductions in tinnitus loudness or questionnaire scores; others, including randomised trials, have found no significant effect on their primary outcomes. Reviews of this area rate the overall certainty as low, and outcomes differ from person to person.[3][4]

Worth stating plainly, because guidance does: the VA/DoD summary says there is no medication, surgery, or device that cures tinnitus.[1] Audiohm is not an exception to that. It is a way of listening to sound.

The idea behind notching is straightforward to describe. Sound is played with a narrow band removed around the pitch a person reports hearing, and the proposal is that the surrounding frequencies, rather than the notched one, are the active ingredient. Studies in this area have measured changes in reported loudness and in brain activity associated with tinnitus, and researchers have offered explanations framed around how auditory processing adapts to input. Those explanations remain theoretical and are not a description of what happens in any individual listener.

A second and much less exotic hypothesis is that sound enrichment simply makes tinnitus less noticeable in a quiet room, particularly at night, by giving the ear something else to attend to. NICE’s framing of sound enrichment as a self-help technique or one part of a wider management programme sits comfortably with this reading.[2]

We do not claim to know which of these, if either, explains anything a listener experiences. NICE has an open research recommendation asking about the effectiveness of combining sound with tinnitus support — an open question in a national guideline is a reasonable signal that this is not settled.[2]

Researchers at Northwell Health randomised 65 people with tinnitus to receive either a free subscription to a notched-sound product (AudioNotch) or standard care, and followed them for 12 months. Being assigned to the product group was associated with a greater reduction in Tinnitus Handicap Inventory scores than standard care over the study period (−10.02 points, 95% CI −18.20 to −1.83, P=0.017). Adherence differed too: at six weeks, 70% of the product group were still using sound compared with 32% of the standard care group.[4]

Two things about this source are worth naming. It is a published summary written by the company whose product was tested, and we are citing it for a result that favours that company’s product. We cite the positive finding and the use-hours finding together because reporting one without the other would misrepresent the trial.

No study has been run on Audiohm. There is no Audiohm-specific outcome evidence, and nothing in Sections 1 to 3 was produced by us or transfers to us. What we can describe is what the product actually does:

• Calibration. You sweep a test tone until it is the closest match you can find to the sound you notice. It is a match you choose by ear, and an approximate one — not a measurement of your tinnitus.
• Filtering. Soundscapes are generated in your browser with a narrow band removed around that frequency. That is a description of signal processing, not of an effect on you.
• Structure and access. A routine you can start nightly, a timer, offline playback, and an optional check-in.

That last point deserves an honest hedge rather than a quiet one. The clearest signal in the trial described above was about engagement and access, not about the sound: the group that kept using something did better, and hours of listening did not predict the outcome.[4] Product structure, access, support, accountability, and whether someone actually keeps going may matter alongside the sound itself. We would rather say that out loud than imply our filter is doing something the evidence does not show.

We hold ourselves to the FTC’s guidance on health-related claims, which expects health claims to be supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence before they are made.[5] Where we have no evidence, the correct thing to publish is that we have no evidence.