Tinnitus by frequency ยท 4 000 Hz
If your ringing sits around 4,000 Hz, you are in one of the most common places for tinnitus to be. It is a high, clear whistle, just below the very top key of a piano (C8 is 4,186 Hz). Below you can hear it, check it against its neighbours and the octaves either side, and hear what masking sounds like with that pitch taken out.
The listening box needs JavaScript and a browser that can make sound. The frequency matcher explains the same thing in words if it cannot run here.
Tone — press again to stop
Masking sound — one minute on this page
Level
That was the minute a browser tab gets. The app plays this all night, built around your own number, with rain, fan, ocean and noise.
Get Sylence on Google PlayStart at the quietest level you can hear. Stop if it makes your ringing louder or uncomfortable. If everyday sounds hurt, stay at the bottom of the ladder. Nothing loads until you press a button, and nothing is uploaded.
Pitch matching drifts from day to day, and the most common mistake is landing an octave out: 2,000 or 8,000 Hz can feel like “the same note” as 4,000. Play each one and listen for the tone that sits on your ringing rather than next to it. 3,000 and 5,000 Hz are there for the same reason: a match is a neighbourhood, not a point.
On a hearing test, damage from loud noise classically shows up as a dip somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 Hz, often deepest near 4,000, with hearing better again at 8,000. Audiologists call it a noise notch. Tinnitus tends to sit at or near the frequencies where the ear is sending the brain less than it used to, which is one reason a 4 kHz ring is common in people who have worked around machinery, music or gunfire.
That is a pattern, not a diagnosis. Some people with 4 kHz tinnitus have a normal hearing test, and only a test can tell you which describes you.
The second pair of buttons plays pink noise, then the same noise with a narrow band around your selected tone removed. That is the idea behind notched sound therapy: leave the tinnitus pitch quiet and keep the frequencies around it busy. The research on notching is mixed, and that page sets it out honestly. What is better supported is simpler: steady background sound makes tinnitus less noticeable for many people, and that is what masking is.
Search for this frequency and you will find hour-long videos of the tone. There is no good evidence that listening to your own tinnitus pitch makes it quieter, and at any real level it is one more high sound for an ear that may already be tired. Use the tone to check your number; use steady background sound to live with it. That is why the tone here stops by itself after 30 seconds.
A high, clear whistle, just below the highest note on a piano (4,186 Hz). People often describe it as a steady ring or a thin electronic tone.
Yes. Most people match their tinnitus somewhere between about 4,000 and 8,000 Hz, and 4,000 Hz is where noise exposure most often affects hearing.
There is no good evidence that it does. A tone is useful for finding your pitch; steady background sound, which is masking, is what makes tinnitus less noticeable for many people.
If none of these tones sits on your ringing, the matcher on the home page sweeps from 1,000 to 16,000 Hz and gives you a number in about a minute, free, in the browser.
Then, if it helps: Sylence on Google Play builds rain, fan, ocean and noise around your number, synthesised on the phone. Masking is free, there is no account, and nothing about your tinnitus leaves the device.
Sylence is a sound-therapy and relief tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, or cure tinnitus, and this page is not a hearing test. If your tinnitus is new, sudden, changing, pulsing with your heartbeat, or in one ear only, see an audiologist or a doctor first — sudden one-sided tinnitus in particular is worth urgent attention.