As many tinnitus sufferers like myself know, the never-ending ringing in your ears can become unbearable at times. Sometimes white noise can help by making it harder to distinguish the ringing from other sounds. I know I’ve run fans in my bedroom while falling asleep to help distract me, for example.
You can use the iPhone’s Background Sounds feature to generate this noise for you. And with Airpods Pro, you can deliver the sound directly to a single ear and let external sounds in so you can still hear what’s going on around you.
Here’s how you do it.
- On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds
- Turn on Background Sounds
- Select the sound you want to hear. I like balanced noise for tinnitus relief.
- Insert your Airpods Pro to get them to connect to your phone.
- Activate transparency mode on the Airpods Pro to let environmental sounds through.
The background sounds will play continuously, but will be suspended for announcements from Siri and phone calls. Interestingly, background sounds are just reduced in volume by about 90% when you start playing Apple Music. There’s a setting in the Background Sounds pane that will disable the background noise while media is playing. Otherwise it will continue playing but will be reduced in volume. Background sounds resume normally after stopping any of those activities.
A few tips for Android users.
Sometimes the sound generator apps have a repeating pattern that you might be able to detect. Instead, try the Brownian noise from https://archive.org/details/TenMinutesOfWhiteNoisePinkNoiseAndBrownianNoise - perhaps best loaded into a media player which does crossfading on repeat, such as JetAudio etc.
If using it for sleep, you may want to silence apps on your phone. However, you may find the occasional app (such as WhatsApp) which will not silence itself in DnD mode. In that case, try Alertify - it can take over the role of generating notification sounds for such apps, and obeys DnD.