Brown Noise for Tinnitus

Masking sound is a comfort measure, not a treatment. Here is where it sits in the clinical guidelines, why the pitch of your tinnitus decides whether brown noise is even the right colour, and how to set the level.

Masking and Habituation Are Two Different Goals

Almost every argument about which sound is "best for tinnitus" is really an argument between two goals that pull in opposite directions, and it is worth separating them before touching a volume slider.

Masking is acoustic. You add an external sound that raises your detection threshold in the same frequency region as the tinnitus, and the tinnitus stops being audible. It works instantly, it works only while the sound is playing, and it is straightforward physics.

Habituation is the opposite bet. The aim is not to hide the tinnitus but to make it matter less — to reduce the distress and attention it commands, so that it is still there but no longer the loudest thing in your day. That is a psychological process, it takes months rather than seconds, and the sound is at most a supporting player in it.

The two goals want different volumes. Full masking wants the sound loud enough to erase the tinnitus. Approaches aimed at habituation generally want it quieter than the tinnitus, so the two are audible together and the brain has something to compare against. If you do not decide which you are doing, you will drift towards whatever is loudest, which is the one outcome nobody recommends.

What Brown Noise Is Actually Doing

Brown noise is a broadband signal falling at roughly 6 decibels per octave, measured at −5.98 dB per octave on this site's generator. In this context that single number is the whole story: it tells you it can only mask things that live low in the spectrum. It is not doing anything to your auditory system beyond adding sound to the room.

Where Sound Therapy Sits in the Clinical Guidelines

The most useful document a person with tinnitus can know about is the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery clinical practice guideline on tinnitus (Tunkel and colleagues, Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, 2014). It covers adults with primary tinnitus that is persistent — six months or longer — and bothersome, and it grades each of its statements by the strength of the evidence behind it. The grading is the part that gets left out of articles like this one.

Sound therapy — the category that ear-level sound generators, hearing aids and, by extension, noise apps belong to — is listed as an option. In that guideline's vocabulary an option is the weakest tier: clinicians may offer it, because the balance of benefit to harm is unclear or the evidence is not strong enough to say more.

By contrast, the panel made a full recommendation that clinicians offer cognitive behavioural therapy to patients with persistent, bothersome tinnitus, and a further recommendation for a hearing aid evaluation where there is documented hearing loss. Those are the interventions with the stronger evidence behind them. If tinnitus is genuinely affecting your life, those two are worth asking about before you spend any more time optimising a noise generator.

It is also worth knowing what the panel recommended against, because the list is long and includes things sold heavily to people with tinnitus: routine antidepressants, anticonvulsants, anxiolytics and intratympanic medication for the symptom itself, and Ginkgo biloba, melatonin, zinc and other dietary supplements. Sound therapy being an option puts it in a better position than any of those. It does not put it anywhere near proven.

The Pitch Problem — and Why Brown May Be the Wrong Colour

Here is the part this page exists to say plainly, and it is not a sales pitch.

Masking is frequency-specific. A masker suppresses your ability to detect sounds close to it in frequency, and does very little for sounds far away from it. Brown noise concentrates its energy at the bottom of the spectrum: by 1 kHz it has already shed about 20 dB relative to 100 Hz, and by 5 kHz about 34 dB, so there is very little left of it up there.

Tinnitus is commonly described by the people who have it as a high tone — a ring, a whistle, a hiss, cicadas, a kettle. If that describes yours, brown noise is fighting in the wrong octave. You can turn it up until it is unpleasant and the ring will still be sitting on top of it, because the masker has no energy where the percept is. Turning it up is the wrong response, and it is also the response that carries the only real physical risk in this whole exercise.

For a high-pitched percept, the colours with usable high-frequency content are the honest suggestion: white noise is flat and carries a great deal of treble, and blue noise tilts upward, though it is bright enough that most people find it tiring for long sessions. Pink noise is the reasonable middle.

Brown noise earns its place here in two specific situations. The first is a low-pitched percept — a hum, a drone, a rumble, the low roar some people describe. The second is comfort: a great many people find that brown noise is the only broadband sound they can leave running for eight hours without the sound itself becoming an irritant, and a sound you can actually tolerate overnight is worth more than a theoretically better masker you switch off after twenty minutes. Test both. There is no published head-to-head trial ranking noise colours for tinnitus, so your own comparison is genuinely the best evidence available to you.

Setting the Level: Find the Mixing Point, Then Stop

The single most consequential thing on this page is a volume instruction, because level is the only variable here with a plausible route to harm.

Bring the sound up from silence, not down from loud. Start with the level at zero and raise it slowly until you reach the point where the sound and your tinnitus first blend into each other and you can no longer confidently separate the two. That blending point is where you stop. Anything beyond it buys you nothing you can perceive and adds exposure you cannot undo.

Do not chase silence. The instinct is to keep raising the level until the tinnitus is completely gone. On a bad night that can mean a very loud room. A sound that reduces the tinnitus from dominant to unremarkable has done the job.

Judge it in the position you will actually be in. Set the level with your head on the pillow, with the door shut and the lights off, not sitting up at a desk. A room's ambient level drops substantially at night, and a setting that felt gentle at 10 pm can be considerably more prominent at 3 am.

Prefer a speaker across the room over headphones for overnight use. Distance is free attenuation, a speaker cannot be nudged into your ear canal while you sleep, and it removes the pressure and hygiene issues that come with sleeping in earbuds.

Features That Belong in a Clinic Rather Than in an App

A noise generator is not a triage tool, and some presentations of tinnitus are specifically the ones a clinician wants to look at. The 2014 guideline is explicit about this in two directions.

It recommends a prompt, comprehensive audiologic examination for tinnitus that is one-sided, that has persisted for six months or more, or that comes with hearing difficulty. Any of those three is a reason to book an appointment rather than to keep experimenting with sound.

The guideline's strong recommendation against routine head and neck imaging is also carefully scoped: it applies to tinnitus that does not localise to one ear, is not pulsatile, and is not associated with focal neurological abnormalities or asymmetric hearing loss. Read the other way, that scoping tells you which features fall outside the ordinary case. Tinnitus that pulses in time with your heartbeat, tinnitus in one ear only, tinnitus alongside neurological symptoms or a lopsided hearing loss — those are for a clinician to assess, and no amount of masking changes that.

Sudden hearing loss, tinnitus that arrives with vertigo, and tinnitus following a head injury or a loud exposure are also conversations to have quickly rather than eventually. Masking a symptom you have not had looked at is the one genuinely bad use of a page like this one.

What the Evidence Does Not Cover

The most rigorous look at this question is the Cochrane review, Sereda and colleagues, Sound therapy (using amplification devices and/or sound generators) for tinnitus (2018). It found eight randomised trials with 590 participants in total. Its finding on the comparisons that would actually answer the question — device versus waiting list, versus placebo, or versus information and advice with no device — was that no usable data existed at all. Not weak data. None.

What the review could compare was one device against another. A single study found no difference between sound generators and hearing aids on tinnitus symptom severity at three, six or twelve months, and three studies pooled together found no difference between combination devices and hearing aids alone. Both comparisons were rated low-quality evidence. Symptom severity did fall clinically meaningfully in the device groups — but with no control arm, that fall cannot be separated from the natural course of the condition, from the clinical attention that came with being fitted, or from regression to the mean.

Two further gaps are worth naming. None of the included studies assessed adverse effects, so the literature is close to silent on whether long-term masking can make anything worse; the review's own pre-specified harm outcome was an increase in self-reported tinnitus loudness, and no trial reported it. And nothing in that evidence base tested a phone or a website. The trials fitted ear-level devices, usually alongside audiological counselling. Whether a free noise app produces the same result as a fitted device plus a clinician's time is untested.

On sleep specifically — the reason many people with tinnitus arrive here — the relevant review is Riedy and colleagues, Noise as a sleep aid: A systematic review (Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2021). Across 38 articles it judged the quality of evidence that continuous noise improves sleep to be very low, explicitly noted that this contradicts how widely it is used, and raised the possibility that continuous noise may negatively affect sleep and hearing. That is the paper honest pages cite, and it does not say what most pages claim it says.

So the summary is: a guideline option rather than a recommendation, a Cochrane review with no data on the questions that matter, no adverse-effect data, no trial of an app, and a negative-leaning review on the sleep side. Plenty of people find masking sound makes their evenings easier. That is a reasonable basis for trying it at a modest volume. It is not a basis for any claim of treatment.

Using the Player Here and the App Overnight

The player at the top of this page generates brown noise in your browser with no install and no recording, so there is no loop point to start noticing during a long quiet evening. Free web sessions run for 30 minutes.

For tinnitus the session limit is the thing that matters, because the moment a masking sound stops is the moment the tinnitus becomes the most prominent sound in a dark, quiet room — which is precisely the wake-up people are trying to avoid. The Android app removes the limit, keeps generating with the screen off, works offline in flight mode, and has a sleep timer if you would rather the sound fade out after you are asleep than run until morning. It is free, and it also gives you the other four colours, which matters here more than on most pages: if your tinnitus is high-pitched, being able to switch to white or pink in a second is the difference between a masker that works and one that does not.

Medical Disclaimer

The information on this website is provided for general educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Brown noise and other sound therapies are not a diagnosis, treatment, or cure for any medical condition, including insomnia, tinnitus, ADHD, or any hearing or sleep disorder.

Always consult a qualified healthcare professional — such as your doctor, an audiologist, or your child's pediatrician — before relying on sound therapy for a health concern, and especially before using it with infants or anyone with existing hearing sensitivity. Never disregard or delay professional medical advice because of something you have read here.

Individual results vary. Any research referenced on this page describes general findings and does not guarantee a particular outcome for you. If you experience discomfort, ear pain, worsening symptoms, or persistent sleep problems, stop use and seek medical guidance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related pages

• Brown Noise for Sleep — The free web player, plus the full guide to brown noise for sleep, focus, and tinnitus.
• Brown Noise — The deepest colour, measured at −5.98 dB per octave — best for traffic rumble and long overnight sessions.
• White Noise — The flat reference colour, measured at 0.00 dB per octave — the best of the five at making speech unintelligible.
• Pink Noise — Equal energy in every octave, measured at −3.07 dB per octave — the natural-sounding default and the audio industry's calibration signal.
• Brown Noise for ADHD — The 2024 meta-analysis with its real numbers — a small benefit on lab attention tasks in ADHD, a negative effect without it, and zero studies of brown noise.
• Brown Noise for Focus — Why concentration is a masking problem measured in speech intelligibility, and why brown noise beats every colour for rumble but loses to white for voices.
• Brown Noise for Babies — The 2014 Pediatrics measurements first: all fourteen infant sleep machines tested exceeded the nursery noise limit at 30 cm, and what that means for level, distance and duration.
• Brown Noise App — Which brown noise app to install, whether it is really free, and the five things an installed app does that a browser tab is not allowed to.