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.

  1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds
  2. Turn on Background Sounds
  3. Select the sound you want to hear. I like balanced noise for tinnitus relief.
  4. Insert your Airpods Pro to get them to connect to your phone.
  5. 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.

  • Mbourgon everywhere
    2•1 year ago

    Dumb question - which Widex app? I came across this post, and am looking in the App Store. There’s a bunch: Widex Tonelink, Widex Beyond, Widex Zen, Widex Evoke, Widex Moment, Widex Enjoy….

    • @LordOfTheChia
      2•1 year ago

      I know on the hearing aides themselves it’s called “Zen” which includes white noise options, narrowband white noise, and the fractal tones. I also think there’s an option for combining white noise with fractal tones. Don’t know if there is a “notched therapy” option (play white noise or other sounds but excluding the frequency of your tinnitus.

      The fractal tones can also be tuned by average frequency and the number of tones played per time period per channel. I know mine plays more tones on the ear opposite where my tinnitus is.

      I’ll post another reply if I can confirm a good fractal tones app. I did a short search in the past but gave up when I came up empty.