Plain-language, evidence-based answers about tinnitus, the protocols, and how this works.

Tinnitus is the perception of sound — ringing, buzzing, hissing, whooshing, or a pulse — with no external source. It’s a symptom, not a disease in itself. The sound usually originates not in the ear but in the auditory pathway and brain, typically as the brain’s response to reduced or distorted input from the cochlea (the inner-ear hearing organ).

Around 10–15% of adults experience persistent tinnitus and roughly 1–2% find it severe enough to significantly affect their quality of life.Bhatt JM et al. (2016) JAMA Otolaryngol — US population prevalence. Most people who develop it find it loud and frightening at first and become less aware of it over weeks to months as the brain habituates — even without specific treatment. Active management (sound therapy, CBT, sleep) accelerates this process.

The most common pathway is damage to cochlear hair cells, particularly at high frequencies — from noise exposure (loud music, machinery, gunfire), age, or both. The brain compensates for reduced input by amplifying spontaneous neural activity in the auditory cortex; that amplified activity is what you “hear.”

Other identifiable causes include:

• Earwax impaction or middle-ear problems (often reversible).
• Jaw, neck, or shoulder issues — somatic tinnitus, which can be modulated by movement or posture in about 65% of chronic cases.
• Ototoxic medications — high-dose aspirin and NSAIDs, loop diuretics, aminoglycoside antibiotics, platinum-based chemotherapy.
• Ménière’s disease, sudden sensorineural hearing loss, or other inner-ear conditions.
• Vascular causes — pulsatile tinnitus that pulses in time with your heartbeat needs medical evaluation.
• Stress, sleep deprivation, and head/neck injury can all trigger or unmask tinnitus.

About 70–80% of cases have a clear or probable identifiable contributor; the rest are idiopathic.

Population studies put the prevalence of persistent tinnitus at 10–15% of adults worldwide, with the largest US population study finding 9.6% over the prior 12 months.Bhatt et al. (2016). 1–2% of adults find it severe enough to be disabling — affecting concentration, sleep, mood, or daily function. Prevalence rises with age and noise exposure; it’s slightly more common in men.

Children can have tinnitus too, though less often (around 5–15% report it transiently). If you have tinnitus, you are far from alone.

Often, yes — if it’s recent. Acute tinnitus (less than 3 months old), particularly when linked to a specific trigger like a loud concert, an ear infection, or a stressful period, resolves on its own in many people. After roughly 6 months it’s classified as chronic and spontaneous resolution becomes less likely.

But this isn’t the whole story. Even chronic tinnitus typically becomes less bothersome over months and years as the brain habituates — the sound may still be there but no longer dominates your attention. That’s the realistic outcome to plan for, and it’s what evidence-based self-help approaches accelerate. Full article →

For most chronic tinnitus, no — there isn’t a treatment that reliably and permanently silences it. But “cure” isn’t the right frame. The realistic outcome evidence-based approaches achieve is reduced loudness, reduced distress, and habituation — the point where it’s still there but no longer dominates your day. This is clinically meaningful and well-documented across decades of research.

If tinnitus has a treatable underlying cause — earwax impaction, an ear infection, an ototoxic medication, untreated blood-pressure or thyroid issues — removing the cause sometimes resolves it. That’s why a proper medical workup before assuming chronic tinnitus is worth doing. For idiopathic chronic tinnitus, the goal is management, not cure, and the management can be very successful.

Be wary of anyone selling a guaranteed cure. The peer-reviewed evidence doesn’t support such claims.

Sudden-onset tinnitus most often follows an identifiable trigger — a concert, a loud workplace exposure, a head cold, a high-stress or sleep-deprived period, or a new medication. Sometimes there’s no obvious trigger.

New-onset tinnitus alone usually isn’t an emergency, but see a doctor urgently if it’s in only one ear, accompanied by hearing loss, dizziness/vertigo, ear pain or fullness, or a pulsing rhythm matching your heartbeat. Sudden sensorineural hearing loss is a medical emergency — treatment within 72 hours has by far the best outcomes.

If your tinnitus is recent, has a clear noise-exposure cause, and isn’t one-sided or accompanied by hearing change, the most important early steps are: protect your ears from further loud sound, sleep well, reduce stress where you can, and try not to focus on the tinnitus constantly. Most acute cases settle over weeks. If it’s still going after 6–8 weeks, that’s when active management becomes worthwhile.

Stress rarely causes tinnitus from nothing, but it strongly modulates how loud and bothersome existing tinnitus feels. The same neural circuits involved in attention and emotion also influence auditory perception, so high stress amplifies tinnitus, and severe tinnitus amplifies stress — a documented vicious cycle.

This is good news, because it means stress reduction is one of the most effective levers you have over your tinnitus distress, even when it doesn’t change the underlying signal. CBT for tinnitus has the strongest evidence base of any intervention. Mindfulness-based stress reduction shows comparable effect sizes. Better sleep, regular exercise, and reducing the “monitoring” habit (constantly checking whether the tinnitus has changed) all help.

Two reasons. First, the environment is quieter — there’s less competing sound, so the tinnitus signal is more salient. Second, tiredness reduces the brain’s ability to suppress unwanted signals, and bedtime is when there’s nothing else to focus on. Most people don’t actually have louder tinnitus at night; it’s just more noticeable.

The fix is straightforward: add gentle, low-volume background sound — a fan, broadband noise, pink/brown noise, or a sleep-specific tinnitus soundscape — so the tinnitus has something to blend into. The sound should be just below the loudness of your tinnitus (the “mixing point”), not above it. Loud masking trains the brain to need it. Full guide to tinnitus and sleep →

For most people, no — it gets less bothersome over time even if the sound itself doesn’t change. The fear that it will get worse is itself a major driver of distress, and that worry tends not to be borne out.

When tinnitus does worsen, there’s usually a cause: ongoing noise exposure, new ototoxic medication, untreated stress or sleep deprivation, an upper-respiratory infection, or rarely a progressing underlying condition. Protecting your ears from loud sound (carry foam earplugs — use them at concerts, on planes, when using power tools), sleeping well, and not constantly checking on the tinnitus all reduce the risk of worsening.

Age-related hearing changes can lead to gradual shifts in tinnitus pitch or character over years, but this is usually subtle.

Yes — this is called somatic tinnitus. The jaw, neck, and shoulder muscles share neural circuitry with the auditory pathway, so muscle tension, jaw clenching, dental issues, or cervical problems can produce or worsen tinnitus. About 65% of people with chronic tinnitus can modulate it by moving their jaw, neck, or shoulders.Levine RA (1999); Won JY et al. (2013).

If yours changes with jaw movement, head position, or after a stressful workday at the keyboard, the somatic component is probably significant. Worth doing: see a dentist about TMJ and night-time grinding (a custom splint helps if you grind); see a physiotherapist about neck and upper-back posture; reduce sustained jaw clenching during the day. Addressing the somatic component can sometimes substantially reduce tinnitus loudness, separate from any sound therapy.

Tinnitus is hearing a sound that isn’t there. Hyperacusis is an abnormal sensitivity to normal sounds — everyday volumes feel uncomfortably loud or painful. They often co-occur (perhaps 40% of people with tinnitus have some hyperacusis), and share related underlying mechanisms (central auditory gain), but they require different management.

If you have hyperacusis, do not start with masking-style sound therapy at any meaningful volume. Start with very low-level, gradual sound exposure under guidance (a sound-tolerance protocol with an audiologist), plus CBT and breathing modules to reduce the threat response. Loud sound therapy can make hyperacusis worse. The Tinnitus Wizard app’s Calm and breathing modules are appropriate; the masking-based modes are not, until tolerance has been built up.

There’s no single “best” — the evidence supports a small set of approaches that work for different people. In rough order of evidence strength:

1. Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for tinnitus — the most-evidenced intervention. Reduces distress, sometimes loudness. Available with a therapist or through structured self-help.
2. Notched sound therapy — broadband noise with the band around your tinnitus pitch removed. Multiple RCTs show modest loudness reductions over 2–3 months of daily use, particularly for pure-tone tinnitus.Okamoto et al. (2010); Stein et al. (2015).
3. Sound enrichment generally — keeping your environment from going silent helps the auditory system relax. Most useful at night and in quiet workplaces.
4. Sleep hygiene — tinnitus and sleep are tightly linked; better sleep usually reduces perceived loudness.
5. Mindfulness-based interventions — comparable effect sizes to CBT for distress reduction.
6. Hearing aids if you have measurable hearing loss — restoring auditory input often reduces tinnitus.
7. ACRN (Acoustic Coordinated Reset) and bimodal stimulation — newer protocols with growing but more limited evidence.

Approaches with no good evidence include “healing frequencies,” 432 Hz tuning, solfeggio tones, most supplements (Lipo-Flavonoid, gingko biloba — not supported by meta-analyses), and devices promising cures. Sound therapy options compared →

About 5 minutes. The setup walks you through pitch matching (finding your tinnitus frequency), volume calibration (Minimum Masking Level), and a quick audio check. You can save and resume — there is no timer pressure.

No — but signing in is recommended. The free tier runs entirely in your browser and saves progress to local storage; you can use Foundation, Calm, breathing, and basic Sleep without an account at all.

Signing in (free, optional, Google or email/password) gets you three useful things: (1) your settings and diary follow you across phone, tablet, and laptop; (2) you survive clearing your browser, switching browsers, or browser updates without losing your calibration; (3) if you upgrade to Pro, your subscription is tied to your sign-in email so you can restore it on any device by tapping Restore Purchases.

We don’t spam you, don’t sell your address, and there’s no marketing email. You can delete the account anytime from the in-app Account menu — it removes the cloud copy and signs you out instantly.

Notched sound therapy works by removing energy at your exact tinnitus pitch. This causes neurons next to the tinnitus-producing region to fire more strongly, which inhibits the tinnitus signal through lateral inhibition. The notch has to be centered on your specific frequency — a generic notch does not work.

Pitch matching is the single most important setup step. Read more about how pitch matching works →

Many people need 2–3 attempts. Match what feels closest — you can rerun calibration any time. If your tinnitus has more than one pitch, choose the most dominant. The protocol still works with an approximate match within roughly ±300 Hz of your true frequency.

Match the most dominant pitch. About 30% of tinnitus is multi-tonal but usually one tone dominates. The notch will partially cover the others as a side-effect. If you find the dominant pitch changes day-to-day, recalibrate every few weeks.

If your tinnitus is purely noise-like (hissing, rushing) with no clear pitch, notched sound therapy is less likely to help — the Sleep Protocol’s brown noise masking and the CBT modules may be more useful for you.

Yes, strongly recommended. Headphones isolate the therapeutic audio from room noise so the spectrum reaches your auditory cortex correctly.

• Bimodal protocol: wired headphones only — Bluetooth adds 50–250 ms of latency that breaks the sound–touch pairing.
• Foundation, Morning, ACRN, Sleep: any decent over-ear or in-ear headphones work. Wired or Bluetooth fine.
• Avoid: bone-conduction headphones (uneven spectrum), single ear-buds (notch only reaches one cortex), open speakers (room reflection ruins the notch).

For the Bimodal protocol, yes — the setup includes a 60-second latency test that measures your specific audio path delay and shifts the cue accordingly. Even with compensation, wired headphones produce better results because the latency is deterministic rather than variable.

For Foundation and ACRN, the therapeutic level is just below your Minimum Masking Level (MML) — the volume at which the noise nearly covers your tinnitus but does not quite. This is the Tinnitus Retraining Therapy “mixing point.”

The app measures this for you in setup. As a rule of thumb: always start low and turn up only to comfortable. Tinnitus therapy never requires loud audio.

Reference: Jastreboff & Hazell (2004), Tinnitus Retraining Therapy.

Turn it down. The protocol is not dose-dependent in the way that “louder is better” — if anything, sustained loud sound can worsen hyperacusis. The therapeutic effect comes from the spectral shape (the notch), not the loudness.

If even low volumes feel uncomfortable, you may have undiagnosed hyperacusis. See the hyperacusis safety question below.

Three separate evidence bases, addressing different aspects of the tinnitus network:

• Foundation Free — broadband noise with a sharp notch at your tinnitus frequency. Promotes lateral inhibition. Daily, gradual. Read the science →
• ACRN Pro (2 free teaser sessions at week 3+) — four short pure tones at specific ratios (0.773, 0.909, 1.091, 1.295× your pitch) played in randomised order. Targets pathological neural synchrony.Tass 2012; Hauptmann 2015.
• Bimodal Pro — tone + a self-administered jaw clench on the beat. Targets the fusiform cells in the dorsal cochlear nucleus that integrate auditory and somatosensory input.Shore 2018; Marks 2018.

Each protocol assumes the previous one’s effects.

• Foundation (Weeks 1–2) primes lateral inhibition.
• ACRN (Weeks 3–4) addresses synchrony in a system that is already partially “loosened.”
• Bimodal (Week 5+) targets a different circuit and works best on a stable acoustic baseline.

The clinical trials for each protocol used multi-week stable baselines for participants. Following the sequence respects that.

The programme is sequenced for a reason. Foundation alone is the most-evidenced single protocol and may be enough for many people. ACRN and Bimodal layer on if you want stronger or different neural targeting.

Most users start with Foundation, build the daily habit, and add the others as they progress. You don’t have to do all three — Foundation is free and unlimited, so sticking with just that is a completely valid choice and the one we recommend if you’re not sure.

Susan Shore at the University of Michigan developed a bimodal stimulation protocol pairing 100ms tones with light somatosensory stimulation (originally electrical, on the cheek or neck), delivered in alternating sequences. Her 2018 trial showed measurable reduction in tinnitus loudness in responders over 6 weeks.

This app implements a self-administered version using a timed jaw-clench cue rather than electrical stimulation. Deep dive on the Shore protocol →

Both are forms of bimodal stimulation, but they target different somatosensory inputs.

• Lenire uses electrical tongue stimulation paired with sound.
• Shore’s protocol (what this app implements) uses jaw/face input paired with sound, delivered through a self-administered clench cue.

The underlying neuroscience — driving plasticity in the cochlear nucleus by pairing inputs — is similar. The delivery hardware differs. Lenire is a paid medical device; this app is free.

No. The app’s Reframe, Psychoeducation, and Acceptance modules are self-directed adaptations of CBT and ACT principles used in tinnitus-specific trials.Cima 2012; Hesser 2012.

They introduce techniques and are useful for many users, but they are not a substitute for therapy with a licensed clinician, especially if your tinnitus distress is severe or you are experiencing depression or anxiety symptoms.

30–60 minutes per day, ideally split into 2–3 shorter sessions for Foundation and ACRN. The Sleep Protocol can run all night at low volume. Bimodal is 30 minutes per day, matching the dose used in Shore’s clinical trials.

Consistency beats intensity. A 30-minute session every day for a month outperforms a 4-hour session once a week.

Cima’s clinical trials showed benefit at around 30 minutes per day. Below ~20 minutes per day, results in the literature are weak. The Sleep Protocol counts toward daily exposure if it runs overnight.

Yes, ideally. Sound therapy works by inducing slow neuroplastic change — like physical therapy, daily small doses outperform infrequent long ones.

If you miss a day, just resume. There is deliberately no streak mechanic in this app, because guilt about missed days is counterproductive for an anxiety-prone audience like ours.

Foundation and Morning Boost are designed for it — the notched noise reads as gentle background and most people can work through it. Bimodal requires attention to the visual cue — do not try to multitask through a Bimodal session.

Yes. The Sleep Protocol offers four soundscapes (Classic / Rainforest / Ocean / Night Garden) with low-volume delta binaural beats. The audio holds at masking volume during the falling-asleep window (about 8 minutes, capped at 30% of your session length) then fades smoothly to a quiet floor by the end of your chosen session (10, 30, 60, or 120 min). It does not use therapeutic notching during sleep — notch therapy needs an awake, attentive auditory system to work, and would also remove energy at your tinnitus frequency, defeating the masking goal.

More on tinnitus and sleep →

No — louder days are often when sound therapy helps most. If a regular session feels stressful, try the SOS Spike Relief button first (3-minute brown-noise + breathing sequence designed for acute spikes), then resume normal use.

Yes for Foundation, ACRN, Morning Boost, and Sleep Protocol — tap the pause button in the player bar. The timer freezes and the audio suspends; tap play to resume from exactly the same point. Bimodal and SOS run in their own focus modes and do not pause (they have dedicated End buttons instead).

Honest answer: most published trials measured outcomes at 12 weeks of daily use. Some people notice changes at week 3–4, some at week 8–12, and some do not respond — neuromodulation is not 100%.

The strongest evidence is for distress reduction (subjective burden), not necessarily loudness reduction. Be realistic about timelines and try to avoid daily comparisons — tinnitus fluctuates naturally, which makes day-to-day judgement misleading.

Yes, in roughly 50–65% of users with moderate, tonal tinnitus, based on the literature.Okamoto 2010; Stein 2015; Pantev 2017.

It is not universal. The Cochrane review (Fuller 2020) found low-to-moderate evidence quality across sound therapy trials — meaning some people benefit meaningfully, but the effect is not yet considered first-line treatment in major guidelines. We do not oversell this.

Bimodal protocols have the strongest emerging evidence of the three approaches. The Lenire TENT-A2 trial (n=326) showed clinically meaningful improvement in 70%+ of participants. Shore’s University of Michigan trials showed similar effect sizes with the cervical/jaw input version.

The browser-based version implemented in this app uses self-administered timing, which is less precise than the lab device. Effect size is likely somewhat lower — we recommend it as an addition to Foundation, not a replacement.

Not necessarily. Tinnitus therapy is not 100%, and the more things you have tried, the harder it tends to get — partly because you have absorbed a lot of disappointment that becomes its own clinical entity (treatment fatigue).

The CBT-style modules in the Calm section directly target the meta-distress of “nothing works,” separate from tinnitus loudness. Worth trying that part even if you are skeptical about the sound therapy.

At therapeutic volumes (just below MML), there is no evidence of harm. Sustained noise above 85 dB damages hearing regardless of source. The app’s volume guidance keeps you well below that level. Daily use for months to years is the norm in clinical sound therapy practice.

For most people, no. About 5–10% of users in trials report transient worsening, usually in the first week, which typically resolves. If your tinnitus persistently worsens with use, stop and consult an audiologist.

Use extreme caution. Start at the lowest possible volume and build up over days, not minutes. Hyperacusis is a contraindication for some sound therapy approaches.

If you have severe hyperacusis or Loudness Discomfort Levels (LDLs) below 70 dB, consult a tinnitus-specialist audiologist before using any sound therapy app. They may prescribe a pink-noise desensitisation protocol first.

Yes, with caveats. Profound loss above 8 kHz can make pitch matching imprecise. The app has a basic audiogram input to compensate frequency response.

For severe loss, a hearing aid or combined hearing aid + masker prescribed by an audiologist will outperform a browser-based app. The hearing aid restores the missing input, which itself reduces tinnitus for many people through restored cortical activity.

No. See a doctor first. Sudden one-sided tinnitus, especially with hearing loss or vertigo, can indicate:

• Vestibular schwannoma (acoustic neuroma)
• Sudden sensorineural hearing loss — a medical emergency where treatment within 72 hours has the best outcomes
• Meniere’s disease
• Cerebrovascular conditions (if also with other neurological signs)

Sound therapy is not appropriate as a first step. See an ENT or GP urgently.

No. Pulsatile tinnitus is mechanistically different from the more common neural tinnitus this app targets. It often has a vascular cause that needs medical investigation (and sometimes treatment). See your doctor for an assessment before using any sound therapy.

Talk to the prescribing doctor first. Ototoxic medications (some antibiotics, chemotherapy agents, high-dose aspirin, certain diuretics) can cause tinnitus. If the drug is still in your system, the underlying cause is ongoing — sound therapy is unlikely to outpace the input.

Once the medication is discontinued and tinnitus persists beyond 6–12 weeks, this app may help.

The core protocols work offline once the page has loaded — the app uses Web Audio API generators rather than streamed audio files. You can save the page to your home screen on iOS or Android for app-like access without an internet connection.

iOS aggressively pauses Web Audio when Safari tabs lose focus. The app uses a hidden HTML audio element to hold media-session focus, which works in most cases. For overnight Sleep Protocol on iOS: keep the tab in front, the device plugged in, and auto-lock disabled in Settings → Display.

If you were signed in, yes. Sign back in and the app pulls your settings, calibration, diary, and Pro entitlement from your Firestore record automatically. This is the main reason we encourage signing in — one click rebuilds everything.

If you weren’t signed in, no automatic restore. Local storage was your only copy. You can re-run the 5-minute calibration to recover your pitch and Minimum Masking Level; the protocols themselves don’t need historical session data to work. (If you had purchased Pro, tap Restore Purchases and enter your purchase email to recover your subscription separately.)

Yes — sign in on both devices. Calibration, settings, diary, and Pro status sync via Firestore the moment you sign in on a second device. Your phone and laptop stay in lock-step automatically.

If you never sign in, each device’s data lives only in that browser’s local storage with no cross-device link. In that case, just re-run the 5-minute calibration on the new device.

Pro entitlement is tied to the account email used at purchase. Open the app on the new device, tap Sign in in the top corner, sign in with the same email, and Pro features will unlock automatically. If you cannot recall the purchase email, contact support with your purchase receipt.

There is no built-in export yet (planned). For now, browser dev tools (Application → Local Storage → tcNZ_v10 key) lets you copy the JSON manually — useful if you want to share data with your audiologist.

Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari all work. Safari on iOS has the audio backgrounding limitation noted above. Brave and other privacy-focused browsers work but their stricter tracking protection can occasionally interfere with localStorage — check settings if progress is not persisting.

The core protocols are based on published, public research. The engineering to implement them in a browser is moderate. Tinnitus Wizard charges only for advanced features (deeper customisation, expanded audio library, hearing aid–style EQ profiles).

Core therapy stays free because gating evidence-based care behind a paywall would undermine the trust the site is built on.

The honest answer: most users never need Pro. The single most evidence-backed protocol — Foundation (notched noise) — is fully free, daily, unlimited, forever.

Free tier — everything you need to start:

• Foundation — the 60-minute notched-noise daily session at your tinnitus pitch. Unlimited, every day, no week cap.
• Sleep Protocol — all four soundscapes (Classic, Rainforest, Ocean, Night Garden) with the hold-then-fade envelope across 10/30/60/120-minute sessions.
• Morning, Calm, the breathing guide, and SOS (3-minute spike-relief module).
• ACRN trial — two free ACRN sessions once you reach week 3, so you can hear what it’s like before deciding.
• Full pitch and Minimum Masking Level calibration, diary, progress tracking, session history, weekly check-ins.
• Optional audio sweeteners: Cinematic ACRN layers, Stealth mode, Frequency jitter, breathing-pacing overlay, plain-English/scientific mode toggle.
• Optional sign-in for cross-device sync, browser-clear protection, and easy Pro restore later if you ever upgrade.

Pro adds:

• ACRN unlimited — the full Tass coordinated-reset protocol (Hann-windowed 3-on/2-off pattern at four pitch ratios). Free users get 2 teaser sessions; Pro is unlimited.
• Bimodal — tone + paced jaw-clench, with the anticipatory pacing ring + count-in scheduler. Pro only.
• The structured 8-week protocol — ordered progression through Foundation → ACRN → Bimodal weeks. Free users can use Foundation indefinitely; the guided multi-week sequence past week 2 is Pro.
• Audiogram-based EQ / Hearing Preset — personalises the audio to your hearing profile so the therapy reaches your reduced-sensitivity bands at a comfortable level.
• Fractal Tones — zen-style non-repeating pentatonic chimes as a Foundation alternative.
• Brown Noise toggle — brown as a Foundation alternative to pink (Sleep already uses brown for everyone — this is for daytime sessions).
• Quiet Counter / Inhibition Response analytics — a trend chart showing whether your residual-inhibition response is improving over time.

Pricing: Pro Monthly $9.99/month · Pro Annual $79/year (~$6.58/month) · Pro Lifetime $249 one-time. Monthly and Annual include a 7-day free trial — cancel any time before day 8 from the in-app subscription portal and you will not be charged. Full terms →

Yes — and the architecture is built to keep it that way.

• Free, signed-out use: All data lives in your browser’s localStorage on your device. Nothing about your sessions, diary, or settings reaches any server. The only request our hosting (Cloudflare) sees is “serve this page”.
• Signed-in use: A small per-user document syncs to Google Firestore so your settings follow you across devices. The document is locked to your user ID — no one else can read it. We never train AI on it.
• Pro subscribers: Stripe handles the card (we never see it) and stores its own customer record; our worker stores a small entitlement record (email, customer ID, tier, period end) needed to verify your access. Resend sends transactional emails about your subscription — trial start/ending, receipts, payment failures, cancellations.

No analytics, no advertising trackers, no behavioural pixels — ever. Full details in the Privacy Policy.

No. We collect the minimum needed to operate the service (email + Stripe customer ID + subscription status if you have one; settings + diary in Firestore if you sign in) and we never sell, rent, or license any of it. We also don’t use your data for advertising or to train AI models — ours or anyone else’s.

The business model is straightforward: free core, paid Pro features, no advertising, no data brokerage.

No, and there will not be. Ads on a tinnitus app would either be irrelevant (annoying) or targeted (which requires the data collection we just said we don’t do).

You don’t have to. Free signed-out use is fully functional. But three concrete things change when you do sign in:

• Survival. If you clear your browser, switch browsers, or your phone offers to “clear unused data,” your calibration vanishes from local storage. Signed in, it’s on Firestore — sign back in and everything returns.
• Cross-device. Use the app on your phone in bed, your laptop at work, your tablet on the couch — all three stay in sync.
• Pro restoration. If you ever upgrade to Pro, the subscription is tied to your sign-in email. Restoring is one tap on any new device.

It’s free, takes about 10 seconds (Google one-click), and there’s no marketing email. The data we sync is tiny — about 5 KB of JSON.

In the app, open the Account menu (top-right) and tap Delete account. This immediately removes your Firestore document, signs you out, and is unrecoverable.

What it doesn’t touch: (a) your browser’s localStorage — that’s yours to clear in your browser settings; (b) Stripe’s customer record if you ever subscribed — Stripe keeps that for tax/legal reasons per its own retention policy, but it’s not linked to anything we use anymore.

If you also want us to delete any beta-tester grant or other record we hold against your email, email info@tinnituswizard.com with “Delete my data” in the subject line and we’ll process it as required by applicable data-protection law.

Beta access is invite-only — there’s no public signup or waiting list. If you’ve been invited, you’ll receive an email with instructions. Activation is: open the app, tap Restore Purchases, enter the email the invite went to. Pro unlocks for the duration of the grant (typically 90 days) with no card required.

Beta access never touches Stripe, never starts a trial, and is not converted to a paid subscription. When it expires the app reverts to the free tier — everything else stays exactly where it was.

If you’d like to be considered for future cohorts, drop us a note at info@tinnituswizard.com describing your tinnitus and how you’d use the app. We can’t guarantee a slot but we read every email.

Most tinnitus apps focus on masking sounds (rain, ocean, white noise) without specific therapeutic intent. Tinnitus Wizard’s distinguishing features:

• Pitch-matched notched therapy (rare in consumer apps)
• Full ACRN implementation with correct tone ratios (also rare)
• Shore-protocol bimodal in-browser
• Sequenced programme across weeks rather than a flat menu
• Embedded CBT modules adapted from Cima 2012

We are not the only good option — pick what fits your budget, hardware, and clinical situation. Read our comparison of free tinnitus apps →

Browser-based means no install friction, no app-store lock-in, easier scientific reproducibility (the code is the protocol), and works on any device with a browser. Trade-offs: iOS audio backgrounding limits and no push notifications. We picked the trade-off in favour of accessibility.

No. Tinnitus Wizard is a self-management tool. If you have not had your hearing assessed, see an audiologist first. If your tinnitus is new, sudden, one-sided, pulsatile, or accompanied by other symptoms, see a doctor before using any sound therapy app.

Tailor-made notched music therapy (Pantev’s original 2010 method) has roughly similar evidence to notched noise. The advantage is engagement — people listen to their own music for longer than they listen to white noise.

The disadvantage is that music has variable spectral content, so notch effectiveness depends on which songs you pick. For consistent dose, notched noise wins. For dose × engagement, notched music wins. Both have a place.

Honestly: usually not completely. For most people, the realistic goal is habituation — your brain learns to filter the sound out of conscious awareness, so it is still there but no longer bothers you.

Some people do see loudness reduction. The CBT-style modules target distress reduction, which has the strongest evidence base of any tinnitus intervention. Full article on whether tinnitus goes away →

Your auditory system constantly filters sounds — you stop hearing your fridge running, traffic outside, your own breathing. Habituation in tinnitus means the brain learning to similarly filter out the tinnitus signal.

It is not silencing — it is promotion to background. Most people who say their tinnitus “went away” have habituated, not silenced. This is the normal endpoint of successful tinnitus management and feels every bit as good as silence to the person experiencing it.

It is normal early on, but yes — it works against habituation. The auditory system filters out predictable sounds; constantly checking the tinnitus tells the brain “this is important, keep monitoring it,” which is the opposite of what you want.

The CBT “Reframe” module addresses this monitoring habit directly. The Calm section’s “Mindfulness of Sound” exercise also helps — deliberately listening to the tinnitus without trying to change it paradoxically reduces its grip.

Across the literature, after 12 weeks of consistent daily use, you can reasonably hope for:

• Distress score (Tinnitus Functional Index, Tinnitus Handicap Inventory) reduced by 10–25 points in responders
• Loudness reduced by 1–3 points on a 0–10 scale in responders
• Improved sleep onset and reduced concentration disruption
• Less “noticing” of tinnitus throughout the day — the start of habituation

These are population averages. Some people see more, some see less, some see nothing.