By Rafaele Joudry

A small study of 8 people has indicated support for a new technique called notched music therapy. The principle is that tinnitus is treated by reducing neural responsiveness to the particular frequency of the tinnitus. This is achieved by removing frequencies at the pitch of the patient's tinnitus from the music.

While this specifically tailored approach may be useful for some people, a similar result has been achieved for over 50 years through Sound Therapy based on the discoveries of Dr. Tomatis. This approach also stimulates neural development and improves the responsiveness and efficiency of neural pathways to sound. The filtering process is applied to the music which stimulates new pathways in the brain causing a remapping of the auditory areas. Although the program is not tailored to a particular pitch of tinnitus, it is still very efficacious because it is stimulating response in the full range of frequencies. Because classical music is so complex and so rich in high frequencies it is the ideal foundation on which to base such a program. Gradual and progressive filtering where high frequencies are intermittently enhanced achieves several results in the auditory system.

1. The middle ear muscles are stimulated with bursts of sound with greater intensity in particular frequency bands, in response to the great variety and dynamic range of the classical music.
2. Inter-neural communications mean that this increased muscular responsiveness ‘wakes up’ or activates all of the auditory pathways through the mechanism of cellular plasticity.
3. The ear is then responsive so that different groups of cilia (receptor cells) in the inner ear can be stimulated with the progressively increasing frequencies in the music.
4. Thus the entire hearing range is stimulated and normalized, resulting for many people in improved hearing acuity and reduced tinnitus.

The multiple elements of this program offer many more potential benefits to the tinnitus sufferer than the simple removal of a certain band of frequencies as in notched music therapy. Such a procedure is unnecessary in most cases, as the overall enhancement of auditory processing usually enables the brain to re-habituate itself and eliminate the recurrence of the tinnitus noise.

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