I've never heard of anything like that.

    That thesis stems from simplistic decisions by practitioners
inexperienced in the paradigms at work in tinnitus. Doctors can
understand common pain since they invariably have already had some in
their life. But they rarely have ever experienced the subtleties of
tinnitus.

    The "noise" they reference is the tinnitus sounds. The "decrease" hey
reference is but a bad use of words. They are attempting to depict the
effect of "masking", where a louder event makes a quieter event seem
less important. Thus the pain of a pinch foreshadows the discomfort of
an itch elsewhere.

    I have experienced the same thing. The tinnitus is a pathology of the
hearing sensors that often as not has been born of exposure to loud
noises (but has other causes). It is no surprise that mildly loud noises
(over 80 dBA for me) will aggravate the tinnitus condition, making said
tinnitus more active; louder, annoyed or whatever you care to call the
increase.

    We have learned in recent years of "acoustic emission", where it is now
well established that the hair cells in the cochlea - not only normally
generate nerve impulses to the brain in common 'hearing' - but also can
 actually generate tiny amounts of sound (detectable with miniature
microphones) in the cochlea.

    Here we have an Alice-In-Wonderland scenario where things happen that
are truly uncommon. Such actions by live objects such as hair cells are
termed as a "Reversible Transducer". In that sense, a loudspeaker can
not only generate sound when electric current is passed through its
voice coil, but the same voice coil will also generate a tiny ac voltage
 when speak into the loudspeaker cone. Most very early microphones were
in essence a tiny loudspeaker connected to an  audio amplifier..

    So we must now live in a world where it is clear that our cochlear hair
cells can generate sound as well as receive it.

    I have recognized for some time the analogy of our hearing mechanism to
"regenerative radio receivers", first popularized in the 'teens and
'20's after WWI. Here, the radio frequency amplifier is made so
sensitive that it amplifies the tiniest radio wave.. so much so that on
occasion it can re-amplify or "regenerate" what tiny energy, usually the
very thermal energy from the antenna into  steady oscillation at times.
During such "incipient oscillations" there could be enough energy put
back into the antenna so as to actually radiate some radio energy. Hence
it became known that houses with such radios in operation could be
identified from a van on the street.  Anyway, the phenomenon exists, and
was well known amongst radio engineers for the first half of the 20th
century.  Later, heterodyne receivers were built, and are in common use
today, which do not rely on incipient oscillations to achieve great
reception sensitivity.

    But Mother Nature (or Evolution) had already discovered the phenomenon
of super-sensitive reception - of sound in this case - via regenerative
amplification. It occurs in the hearing system of all animals, likely
from the dinosaur age foreword on earth.

    Thus you can appreciate that when pathology develops in regenerative
reception hearing systems, sounds of average level can be distorted,
aggravated, or whatever else you may term it. In our throw-away economy,
we throw out the malfunctioning radio and electronics to replace it
anew. With hearing...........

    We have to protect a damaged auditory system from such aggravations. To
this day, I carry a set of ANC earmuffs in my car for my use on long
trips (over 50 miles), as the din of high speed road noise (50-500 Hz),
likely 70 dBA, aggravates my tinnitus. The ANC muffs nicely remove said
aggravation. I also installed a microphone and amplifier to pick up a
fraction of the ambient sound, passing but a band from 1kHz-2kHz for
hearing voice and siren sounds back into a secondary tiny speaker under
the muffs (now commonly done in aircraft pilot ANC muffs for ATC
communication), and to listen to news and music. Works great for me.

    se la vie.

        Angelo Campanella

Take your doctor's advice and if it does not work you can always go
back to him for evalution.

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Take your doctor's advice and if it does not work you can always go
back to him for evalution.

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