Brown Noise for Tinnitus

Masking and Habituation: Two Different Goals

Most arguments about which sound is "best for tinnitus" are really about two goals that pull in opposite directions. It is worth separating them before you touch the volume.

Masking is about sound. You play a steady outside sound that covers your tinnitus, so you can no longer hear it. To work, the sound must be at about the same pitch as the tinnitus. It works at once, it works only while the sound plays, and it is simple physics.

Habituation means getting used to the tinnitus. The aim is not to hide it but to make it matter less: to reduce the distress and attention it takes, so it is still there but no longer the loudest thing in your day. That happens in the mind, it takes months, not seconds, and the sound plays at most a supporting role.

The two goals need different volumes. Full masking needs the sound loud enough to cover the tinnitus completely. Approaches aimed at habituation usually want it quieter than the tinnitus, so you can hear both together and the brain has something to compare. If you do not decide which you are doing, you will drift towards whatever is loudest, and nobody recommends that.

What Brown Noise Is Actually Doing

Brown noise is a steady sound made mostly of deep, rumbling sound. It gets steadily quieter as the pitch goes up. We measured this site's brown noise, and it follows that pattern exactly. For tinnitus, that one fact is the whole story: brown noise can only cover sounds that are low in pitch. It does nothing to your ears beyond adding sound to the room.

Where Sound Therapy Sits in the Medical Guidelines

The most useful document for a person with tinnitus 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 whose tinnitus has lasted six months or longer and bothers them. It grades each piece of advice by how strong the evidence is. Articles like this one usually leave out the grades.

Sound therapy is listed as an option. Sound therapy includes sound generators worn at the ear, hearing aids and, by extension, noise apps. In this guideline, an option is the weakest grade. It means clinicians may offer it, because the balance of benefit and 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 (CBT, a talking therapy) to people with long-lasting, bothersome tinnitus. It also recommended a hearing aid check where hearing loss has been confirmed by a test. Those have stronger evidence behind them. If tinnitus is really affecting your life, ask about those two before you spend more time adjusting a noise generator.

It is also worth knowing what the panel advised against, because the list is long and includes things sold hard to people with tinnitus. It advised against routine antidepressants, anticonvulsants, anti-anxiety medicines and medicine injected through the eardrum for the symptom itself. It also advised against 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 make 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 works by pitch. A covering sound hides sounds close to its own pitch and does very little for sounds far from it. Brown noise is mostly deep sound, and it gets much quieter as the pitch goes up. In the high range, very little of it is left.

People with tinnitus often describe it as a high sound: a ring, a whistle, a hiss, cicadas, a kettle. If that sounds like yours, brown noise is working in the wrong range. You can turn it up until it is unpleasant, and the ring will still sit on top of it, because brown noise has almost no energy at that pitch. Turning it up is the wrong response. It is also the one step here with a real physical risk.

For high-pitched tinnitus, the honest suggestion is a colour with more high sound. White noise is even across all pitches and has a lot of high sound. Blue noise leans towards high sounds, but it is bright enough that most people find it tiring for long sessions. Pink noise is a sensible middle choice.

Brown noise is useful here in two cases. The first is low-pitched tinnitus: a hum, a drone, a rumble, or the low roar some people describe. The second is comfort. Many people find brown noise is the only steady noise they can leave on for eight hours without the sound itself becoming annoying. A sound you can stand all night is worth more than a better-matched sound you switch off after twenty minutes. Test both. No published study ranks noise colours for tinnitus, so your own comparison really is the best evidence you have.

Setting the Volume: Find the Blending Point, Then Stop

The most important thing on this page is a volume instruction, because volume is the only thing here that could plausibly cause harm.

Turn the sound up from silence, not down from loud. Start at zero and raise the volume slowly. Stop at the point where the sound and your tinnitus first blend together and you can no longer clearly tell them apart. Anything louder gives you nothing you can notice and adds exposure you cannot undo.

Do not chase silence. The urge is to keep turning it up until the tinnitus is completely gone. On a bad night, that can mean a very loud room. A sound that takes the tinnitus from overwhelming to unremarkable has done its job.

Set it where you will actually be. Set the volume with your head on the pillow, the door shut and the lights off, not sitting up at a desk. A room gets much quieter at night, and a setting that felt gentle at 10 pm can stand out much more at 3 am.

Use a speaker across the room, not headphones, overnight. Distance lowers the volume for free. A speaker cannot get pushed into your ear while you sleep, and you avoid the pressure and hygiene problems of sleeping in earbuds.

Signs That Need a Clinic, Not an App

A noise generator cannot tell you what is wrong. Some kinds of tinnitus are exactly the ones a clinician wants to check. The 2014 guideline is clear about this in two ways.

It recommends a prompt, full hearing test for tinnitus that is in one ear only, that has lasted six months or more, or that comes with hearing difficulty. Any one of those three is a reason to book an appointment, not to keep experimenting with sound.

The guideline strongly advises against routine head and neck scans, but only in a specific case: tinnitus that is not in one ear only, does not pulse, and does not come with signs of a nerve or brain problem or with uneven hearing loss. Read the other way, that tells you which signs fall outside the ordinary case. Tinnitus that pulses in time with your heartbeat, tinnitus in one ear only, or tinnitus with nerve or brain symptoms or uneven hearing loss is for a clinician to assess. No amount of masking changes that.

Sudden hearing loss, tinnitus that comes with vertigo (a spinning feeling), and tinnitus after a head injury or a very loud noise all need a doctor soon, not eventually. Covering a symptom you have not had checked is the one truly bad use of a page like this.

What the Evidence Does Not Cover

The most careful 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 people in total. The useful comparisons would be a device against a waiting list, against a placebo (a dummy treatment), or against information and advice with no device. For those, no usable data existed at all. Not weak data. None.

What the review could compare was one device against another. One study found no difference between sound generators and hearing aids in how bad the tinnitus was at three, six or twelve months. Three studies pooled together found no difference between combined devices and hearing aids alone. Both comparisons were rated as low-quality evidence. Symptoms did improve by a meaningful amount in the device groups. But with no comparison group, nobody can separate that from natural change over time, from the extra care that came with being fitted, or from a bad patch simply easing back towards normal.

Two more gaps are worth naming. None of the studies checked for side effects, so research says almost nothing about whether long-term masking can make anything worse. The review planned to look for one harm, tinnitus that people report as louder, and no trial reported it. Also, none of this evidence tested a phone or a website. The trials fitted devices worn at the ear, usually with counselling from a hearing specialist. Nobody has tested whether a free noise app gives the same result as a fitted device plus a clinician's time.

On sleep, which is why many people with tinnitus come here, the key 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 steady noise improves sleep to be very low. It noted that this does not match how widely noise is used, and it raised the possibility that steady noise may harm sleep and hearing. Honest pages cite this paper, and it does not say what most pages claim it says.

So, in short: the guideline calls sound therapy an option, not a recommendation. The Cochrane review has no data on the questions that matter and no data on side effects. No trial tested an app. And the sleep review leans negative. Many people find that masking sound makes their evenings easier. That is a fair reason to try it at a modest volume. It is not a reason to call it a treatment.

Using the Player Here and the App Overnight

The player at the top of this page makes brown noise in your browser, with nothing to 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 matters. When a masking sound stops, the tinnitus becomes the loudest thing in a dark, quiet room, and that is exactly the wake-up people want to avoid. The app removes the limit, keeps playing with the screen off, works offline in flight mode, and has a sleep timer if you would rather the sound fade out after you fall asleep. It is free, and it also has the other four colours. That matters here more than on most pages: if your tinnitus is high-pitched, switching to white or pink in a second can decide whether masking works for you or 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

• Best Tinnitus Masking Apps — Nine tinnitus apps compared on their store listings, next to what medical guidelines and a large review say about sound therapy.
• 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: a steady rumble that is best for traffic noise and long nights.
• Brown Noise Generator — A real brown noise generator in your browser: made live as you listen, with no file and no loop.
• White Noise — The flat, bright colour, and the best of the five at making speech impossible to follow.
• Pink Noise — The balanced, natural-sounding colour: a good default, and the sound engineers use to test speakers.
• Brown Noise for ADHD — A 2024 review found a small benefit from white and pink noise on lab attention tasks in ADHD, a small drop without ADHD, and no studies of brown noise.
• Brown Noise for Focus — Why focus is mostly about blurring speech you can follow, 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 were louder than the nursery noise limit at 30 cm. What that means for volume, distance and time.
• Brown Noise App — Which brown noise app to install, whether it is really free, and what an app can do that a browser tab cannot.
• Masking vs Earplugs — Earplugs work least well on deep sounds, which is most household noise. Masking can be matched to the noise. Why the answer is usually both.
• Sound Masking — Masking does not block sound. It raises the background so the noise stops standing out, and the colour has to match the noise.
• About — Who publishes this site, how we check what we write, and how we handle health topics.