What Tinnitus Saurus Is — and Isn't

Last Updated: April 27, 2026

Tinnitus is a frustrating, often poorly served condition, and the App Store has its share of products that overpromise. We'd rather underclaim and earn your trust than oversell and lose it. This page lays out, in plain language, what Tinnitus Saurus is built to do, what it isn't, and what the research actually supports.

What Tinnitus Saurus Is

Tinnitus Saurus is a wellness sound-therapy app based on the published research on notched sound therapy. It lets you match your tinnitus pitch independently for each ear, then plays notched noise (white, pink, brown) or your own music with the matched frequency removed in real time. It tracks your sessions and a daily severity score so you can see whether anything is changing over weeks and months.

It's in the App Store's Health & Fitness category, not Medical. We use language like "may help reduce perceived loudness" on purpose — not as legal hedging, but because that is the most honest thing the research lets us say.

What Tinnitus Saurus Isn't

• Not FDA-cleared. We have not pursued, and have not received, FDA Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) clearance. We're explicit about this in our App Store Connect "regulated medical device" declaration.
• Not a regulated medical device in any country or region.
• Not a cure. The research on notched therapy is suggestive, not definitive, and the effect sizes in published trials are modest. Cochrane has found insufficient evidence to recommend sound therapy as a standalone intervention for tinnitus (Sereda et al., 2018).
• Not a substitute for an audiology evaluation. A qualified audiologist or ENT should rule out underlying causes before any therapy — especially for new, sudden, asymmetric, or pulsatile tinnitus, or tinnitus accompanied by hearing loss. Many conditions can present with tinnitus, including (as examples, not an exhaustive list) earwax impaction, Eustachian tube dysfunction, otosclerosis, sudden sensorineural hearing loss, and rarely vestibular schwannoma. We don't evaluate or diagnose any of these.
• Not validated for severe asymmetric hearing loss. Although we built per-ear pitch matching specifically because most apps don't handle different pitches in each ear, large asymmetries in hearing thresholds — not just tinnitus pitch — should be reviewed by a clinician first.
• Not appropriate without caution if you have hyperacusis. Chronic exposure to sound, even at low volumes, can be problematic for people with hyperacusis or reduced loudness discomfort levels (LDLs). Talk to an audiologist before starting.
• Not designed to treat hearing loss. If you wear hearing aids, your audiologist's programmed amplification will likely be more effective than anything our app plays through standard earbuds.

What We Have Not Done

• We have not run our own clinical trial. The research we cite is from independent academic groups, not from us.
• We have no outcome data from our own users. We have not systematically measured whether our app reduces tinnitus loudness or severity in the people who use it. We may publish aggregated, anonymized data in the future, but as of today we have nothing to share.
• The pitch-matching procedure in the app has not been validated against clinical audiometry. Self-administered pitch matching via consumer earbuds in an uncontrolled room is meaningfully less reliable than what an audiologist can do in a sound booth. For best results, ideally have a clinician confirm your tinnitus pitch and use that as a reference.
• The daily severity score in the app is a self-report tracker we designed for personal trend visualization. It is not a validated clinical instrument such as the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI) or Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI), and should not be used as a substitute for one.

How Notched Therapy Is Hypothesized to Work

The leading hypothesis is lateral inhibition: when you listen to sound that has your tinnitus pitch removed, the auditory neurons tuned to the frequencies adjacent to your tinnitus pitch are stimulated more strongly than they would be without the notch (and with reduced inhibition from the now-silent neurons inside the notch). Those activated neighbors then inhibit activity in the cortical region corresponding to your tinnitus frequency. In published studies, some participants reported a reduction in perceived loudness over time.

That's the theory. The original PNAS paper (Okamoto et al., 2010) showed promising 12-month results in a small cohort using tailor-made notched music. Pantev's group and Teismann replicated elements of the effect. A later trial using broadband notched noise (Stein et al., 2016) did not show a clear benefit over active control, suggesting the effect may depend on the music carrier rather than the notch alone. So the picture is: a plausible mechanism, modest evidence, mixed replications, and a clear dependence on pitch-matching accuracy and consistent daily use.

The Research We Built On

• Okamoto H, Stracke H, Stoll W, Pantev C. (2010). Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(3), 1207-1210.
• Teismann H, Okamoto H, Pantev C. (2011). Short and intense tailor-made notched music training against tinnitus. PLoS ONE, 6(9), e24685.
• Pantev C, Okamoto H, Teismann H. (2012). Tinnitus: the dark side of the auditory cortex plasticity. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1252, 253-258.
• Stein A, Wunderlich R, Lau P, et al. (2016). Clinical trial on tonal tinnitus with tailor-made notched music training. BMC Neurology, 16, 38.

Who Built This and Why

Tinnitus Saurus was built by an engineer with tinnitus and Parkinson's disease, after years of being told to "just live with it." My left ear started ringing first, my right joined a year ago at a different pitch, and no app I tried handled that. The first thing I built was a waveform-inversion experiment to cancel the sound — that didn't work, and finding out why led me to the actual research. The app is the result of that path. I'm not a clinician, and I won't pretend to be one. If something on this page is wrong, I'd rather know than not.

Questions or Corrections

If you're a clinician, researcher, or person with tinnitus and you spot something on this page that's misleading, please email support@tinnitussaurus.com. We'll fix it and credit the source.

This page is informational. It is not medical advice. If you have new, sudden, asymmetric, or pulsatile tinnitus — or tinnitus with hearing loss, dizziness, or pain — please see a licensed audiologist or ENT.