The Concept of Masking

ATA PODCASTS: TRANSCRIPT

The Concept of Masking

Title: The Concept of Masking
Description:Tinnitus researcher and clinician William Hal Martin, Ph.D. discusses the concept of tinnitus masking
Author: American Tinnitus Association; recorded by filmmaker, ATA member and advocate Jose Zambrano Cassella
Length: 01:43
Size: 1.18 MB

Transcript

(Music intro)
 

William Hal Martin, Ph.D.: A patient came to Portland, many years ago, and was actually walking on a tour around the city and was standing by a fountain and found that as long as he stood by the fountain he couldn't hear his tinnitus at all- he had complete relief- which was amazing for this guy as he had tinnitus for several years. He just did not want to leave there.

But the practicalities of carrying around a fountain with you or living by a fountain are limited so they began to do research here on trying to generate some small devices. Something that a person could wear that would create sounds similar to a waterfall, since it seemed to work for this person, that people could use to help get relief from their tinnitus. It didn't make the tinnitus go away, it did not make it stop, but what it did was it gave them relief and at least some control, they had a sound that they could control, that they could adjust and set to a level that they could tolerate and would compete with their tinnitus in a way that made it easier to live. And, so, that technology was developed and first implemented here and those were called maskers.

Masking is a phenomenon that happens whenever you have two sounds that are competing. If you have one sound, you can bring in another sound and mask the first sound. You can hide it to where it does not appear. You can do total masking where it's completely gone or partial masking where you just take away part of it.
 

(Music outro)