I deal with the pain in joints. Sure it hurts. Yeh, unless I really concentrate on moving beyond the pain, my grip is weaker, for example. Big deal. It’s the worsening tinnitus that ranks right up there at the top.
I’ve fairly well (roughly) isolated the frequencies that result in the most pain/inducement of harmonic disturbances via interaction with my tinnitus. I try to avoid those, but the greater the range of frequencies (and harmonics, overtones, etc.) expressed by a piece of music, the greater likelihood of problems on my end. And that’s a BIG PITA since I really, really find great pleasure in music. (I was actually making significant–to/for me–progress with my lil Bach Strad Cornet before I put it away because playing it just hurt too much. *shrugs* At least I can still “play” it in my head.)
Of course, some of the loudest frequencies in my tinnitus are those ranges also inhabited by the enunciation of consonants in speech, hence a growing dependence on watching an interlocutor, since all the vowels are clear as a bell, and only consonants seem seriously affected by being overwhelmed with noisy tinnitus.
Other frequencies above and below my tinnitus are only interfered with my the apparent “loudness,” which varies according to other conditions. As recently as a couple of years ago, for example, I was able to hear the “mosquito ring tone” us Olde Phartes are supposed to be unable to hear. *shrugs* It was outside those frequencies masked by my tinnitus and the examples I listened to weren’t on any “conflict overtones”.
I hope that the trials on a vagus nerve treatment for tinnitus are successful in humans and are approved for general treatment sometime soon. That would be cool. I could deal with arthritis pain while playing a horn. Heck, I might even try singing again.
Let me dream, OK?
Gee David, this is perspective on tinnitus I had not even thought of. So, certain frequencies ‘beat’ do they with the frequency of your tinnitus. So it’s stay away from piccolo players eh?
Sort of, Colin. I noticed a few years ago that when I whistled, I didn’t experience the tinnitus “conflicts” I experienced at other times (I tend to fill otherwise “empty” time with whistling tunes running through my head. For years I was only semi-aware of doing so until I was shopping one day and a clerk stopped me and thanked me for the musical addition to his day *shrugs* Some people appreciate Muzak no more than I do, it seems). That’s when I started exploring where the tinnitus-filled holes in my hearing were, and I seem to be avoiding those that engender overtone conflicts with my worst/loudest tinnitus. I dunno, there may be–probably are–other other mechanisms at play as well. My tune whistling is normally in nominally upper flute registers, which would place it well below both upper piccolo register and my primary tinnitus tones.
I’ve also been bothered very much for many years before my tinnitus became really annoying by the “beat” between tuned and untuned pitches. (OTOH, when I was teaching instrumental music, it did make it somewhat easier to both help the kids tune and to help them learn to “hear the beat” and tune themselves more accurately. A decent enough trade-off I thought at the time. Unfortunately, it also made being around our church’s piano/keyboard instruments used for congregational accompaniment extremely annoying, especially since the church had at one time used a jackleg “piano tuner” instead of a well-trained and experienced technician to replace a pegboard in the piano and it refused to hold what poor tempering the jackleg “tuner” had done. *sigh*)
Oh, well. Nowadays most of the music I listen to is in my mind’s ear, performed as I recall it when I was singing/playing/directing and doing more active listening. With that in mind, here’s a neat place with scores to download, print out and read through/”listen to” in one’s mind’s ear–one example on the page linked:
http://musescore.com/user/20868/scores/36975
The application (MuseScore) isn’t quite as capable as the transcription software I’ve used for a couple of decades, but for a free software it’s pretty darned good, from what I have seen in trying it out.