Oliver Conway

about one in eight people has long-standing or permanent tinnitus, and about one in eight of them has a long-term impairment to quality of life, suffering, sleep disturbance, or other impairment on account of their tinnitus.

So probably a billion people worldwide have it.

Currently, treatments aim not to take the sound away, but aim to help people live better with it.

And we often use the analogy of the sound of a computer fan or an air conditioner in an office.

But if the sound grabs your attention, it's hard to disengage from it, causes stress.

So what we're trying to do is develop a form of sound that helps actually quieten the tinnitus persistently, even when you're not listening to them.

You listen to them on a regular basis, maybe an hour a day or more, and they have a lasting quietening effect.

53 people received this type of sound, roughly an hour a day for six weeks.

And we found that on average, tinnitus got significantly partially quieter.

And this effect endured for even at least three weeks after they stopped listening.

But we didn't monitor for longer after that.

Really, what we want to do is get funding to work with software developers and sound engineers to build that rippling or the subtle wavering you heard into sounds that people actually want to listen to for pleasure, like music or talk radio.

And so the treatment for their tinnitus can be built into the listening they're already doing on a daily basis rather than having to listen to those weird buzzy notes.

Dr Will Sedley from Newcastle University in the northeast of England.

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