Free tinnitus sound generator

Which sound should I pick?

Match the sound to the character of your tinnitus. High, thin ringing usually blends best with brighter sounds: white noise, blue noise, shower, or a waterfall. Lower humming or buzzing tends to blend with darker sounds: brown noise, an old fan, a train or airplane cabin. Pink noise and steady rain sit in between and are a good first try for most people.

There is no single best sound. Comfort matters more than the color of the noise, because a sound you find pleasant is one you will actually keep on. Try one sound for a few evenings before judging it, and track how loud and how bothersome your tinnitus felt.

Masking vs. blending

Full masking means the sound is loud enough that you no longer hear your tinnitus. It can give quick relief, but it keeps the tinnitus out of reach of habituation, which is the slow process of the brain learning to treat the sound as unimportant. Many clinicians suggest a softer level, sometimes called the mixing point, where you can hear both the sound and your tinnitus at once.

In practice: start at a whisper, raise the master volume until the edges of your tinnitus soften, then stop.

What the evidence says

The American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery guideline lists sound therapy as an option clinicians may recommend for persistent, bothersome tinnitus. A 2018 Cochrane review found the research too low in quality to show that sound therapy beats placebo or counseling alone. So sound generators are a reasonable, low-risk comfort tool, best used alongside an audiologist’s care, not instead of it.

Where these sounds come from

These are the exact loops from the TinnitusBuddy iOS app: seamless, normalized to the same loudness, and either made by us or recorded by Freesound contributors under Creative Commons licenses (credited below). Nothing is uploaded or recorded from your device. The page only plays audio.