How to use Aural Rest

Before you start

• Use headphones. Wired or good closed-back headphones give the most accurate match. The phone speaker will not work for matching.
• Find a quiet room so your tinnitus is clearly audible.
• Turn your phone volume low before the first tap, then raise it gradually. The tone should never be louder than your tinnitus.
• If any sound is uncomfortable, turn it down. Loud listening makes tinnitus worse.

Find your tone

1. On Tune, tap Start (or Match again) and follow the four steps. Pick the ear you are matching. Choose Both if your tinnitus sounds the same in both ears or seems inside your head. If each ear rings at a different pitch, match them separately (Left, then Right): each ear gets its own notch.
2. Pick the sound. Pure tone if your tinnitus is a whistle or ring. Narrow hiss if it sounds like hissing or steam.
3. Tap Play tone and drag the slider until the tone is close to your tinnitus pitch.
4. Refine with Lower and Higher, or open Fine tune for 10-cent steps and an exact Hz value.
5. On the octave check, tap Lower, Yours and Higher, and choose whichever sounds most like your tinnitus. If it is not Yours, tap Use and check again.
6. Tap Save match.
7. Repeat steps 3 to 6 until you have 3 to 5 matches, ideally on different days and starting from a different slider position each time.
8. Tune shows whether your matches agree. Check octave means one is probably an octave off: open Saved matches, delete the outlier and match again.

Notched listening

1. Open Listen. Each ear's notch comes from that ear's matches plus your Both matches, one octave wide, which is the width used in the published studies. Tap Notch on Listen to see the chart, set Output and Balance, or adjust it by hand.
2. Pick the sound. My music works best with full-range, well-recorded music: rock, pop, orchestral, jazz. Avoid low-bitrate files, talk and bass-heavy mixes with little top end. Generated sounds are the alternative, and the better choice when the notch is above 8 kHz. See Choosing a sound below for which ones suit your tone.
3. For your own music, choose My music on Listen and open Music library. The first time, allow access to music and audio. See Music player below.
4. Tap Play. Set a comfortable, moderate volume with the phone's buttons. Background to normal listening level, never loud.
5. Leave Notch on. Use the notch button only for a quick A/B to hear what is removed.
6. If your tinnitus is louder in one ear, open Notch on Listen and move Balance toward that ear.
7. On the Notch page, set Output to match how you listen. Headphones keeps each ear's notch in that ear. Speaker removes both ears' bands from the sound, since both ears hear it.
8. Listen 1 to 2 hours a day, every day. Playback continues with the screen off and in the background. The studies ran 3 to 12 months; expect no change in the first weeks.

Music player

• Music library shows all the music on your phone. Songs, Artists, Albums and Playlists are along the top, with a search box above them that finds songs by title, artist or album.
• Songs can be sorted by Title, Artist, Album or Recent (newest added first). Drag the letters down the right edge to jump through a long list.
• Tap a song to play that list from there. Play plays a whole list in order and Shuffle plays it in random order.
• The ⋮ button next to a song opens its menu. Play now starts it right away and keeps your queue. Play next puts it after the current song. Add to queue puts it at the end. Add to playlist saves it to a playlist. Albums, artists and playlists have the same menu for all their songs.
• While music is loaded, a mini player sits along the bottom of every screen with the cover, Notch on/off, Play/Pause and Next. Tap it for Now playing: seek bar, previous and next, Repeat (all, one, off), Shuffle up next, and the queue.
• Notch on/off switches the notch for the music right away. Turn it off only for a quick comparison. Listening time with it off does not count toward your goal.
• Queue lists everything coming up, in the order it will play. Tap a song to jump to it, or use its menu to move it, play it next or remove it. Save as playlist keeps the queue for later.
• Playlists: New playlist starts an empty one, and Add to playlist fills it. In a playlist, each song's menu has Move up, Move down and Remove. The playlist's own menu has Rename, Save as .m3u file and Delete.
• Load .m3u brings in a playlist from another player or your computer. Songs are matched to the music on this phone by file path, then by folder and file name. The app tells you if some could not be found.
• Music missing? Android lists the music it has indexed. Files in a folder that contains a .nomedia file are skipped, and newly copied music can take a moment to appear.

Visualizer

• Open Visualizer from Now playing, Listen or Sleep to watch whatever is playing: your music or a generated sound. It fills the whole screen and keeps the screen on. Swipe left or right to change the picture, tap to hide or show the controls, and press Back or Exit to leave.
• Bars: a classic spectrum analyzer, low notes on the left and high on the right, with peak caps that hang and fall.
• Waterfall: a scrolling picture of the sound over time, low notes at the bottom. With the notch on, it cuts a dark channel straight through your music at your tone.
• Scope: the waveform itself, with a small spectrum along the bottom.
• Radial: the spectrum wrapped around the album cover.
• Seeing the notch: the shaded band with dashed edges is the part of the sound being removed, labeled with its pitch. Inside it, an outlined block above each bar shows how loud that part of the music would have been without the notch. That outline is exactly what the notch is taking out.
• Turn the notch off and the band fills back in; turn it on and the gap opens again. The colors button switches between Classic, Aural and Fire.
• Now playing also shows a small live spectrum under the controls. Tap it to open the full visualizer.
• The visualizer uses the app's own audio as it plays. It does not use the microphone and needs no extra permission.

Choosing a sound

• The notch can only remove sound that is there. A sound suits notched listening when it has plenty of energy around your tinnitus pitch: the notch takes out the band at your tone, and the sound on either side of the gap does the work.
• Every sound on the wheel is rated against your saved tone. Great for your tone: lots of sound around your pitch, the best choices for notched listening. Fair for your tone: some, and it still helps. Sleep and masking only: almost nothing near your pitch, so there is little to notch. Fine for falling asleep, but it does little for the therapy.
• Tap Best for my tone above the wheel to show only the best sounds, best first. All sounds brings the full wheel back. The ratings follow your tone: if you match again or adjust the notch, the list updates.
• If each ear has its own notch, a sound is rated by the weaker ear, since both notches need sound to work.
• As a rule of thumb: high tones (above about 3 kHz) suit white, rain, blue, gray, waterfall and pink. Middle tones suit stream, wind, rain and pink. Low tones suit brown, ocean, fireplace and airplane.
• Fan, airplane, fireplace and ocean are mostly deep sounds. They are popular for sleep, but for a typical tinnitus pitch of 4 to 8 kHz they are masking only. Layer one with rain or waterfall in Sleep to keep notched listening going.
• Thunder plays distant rumbles with quiet stretches between them. It is meant to be layered with rain.
• Before you have saved a tone match, the ratings and the filter are hidden.

Relief test

1. Save your matches first; the test plays at your notch pitch.
2. On Tune, open Relief test, set the volume clearly louder than your tinnitus but comfortable, then tap Start.
3. Relax for the 60 seconds. When the sound stops, listen to your tinnitus.
4. If it is quieter, tap Ringing is back when it returns to normal, then say how much quieter it got. If nothing changed, tap It never got quieter.
5. Repeat every week or two. Results are listed on Progress.

Sleep mode

1. Open Sleep and spin the sound wheel: six noise colors (white, pink, brown, blue, violet, gray), rain, ocean, waterfall, stream, wind, thunder, fireplace, fan and airplane. Tap the card in the middle to add it to the mix; add more to layer them, and set each level under Sound options. The sounds in the mix show as chips under the wheel: tap one to take it out, or Clear all to start over. All are generated live, so nothing loops. Best for my tone works here too.
2. In Sound options, choose Notched to keep notched listening going overnight (that time counts toward your goal), or Plain for an ordinary noise machine. Output is Phone speaker unless you sleep in headphones or sleep buds.
3. Pick a timer, or All night to play until you stop it. Timed sounds fade out over the last minute.
4. Keep the level low. Sleep sound should sit just below your tinnitus, never loud.
5. Tap Start. It keeps playing with the screen off; stop it from the notification or the app.
6. For a bedside clock, tap Clock with the phone on its charger. The screen stays on and dimmed. On the clock, slide up or down for brightness and left or right to change color. Tap it for Stop, Color and Exit; Back also leaves it. To have the app open straight to the clock, choose Settings > Start on > Bedside clock.

Other music apps

1. In Settings, turn on Notch other music apps. A notification shows while it is active.
2. Start playback in Spotify, YouTube Music or another player. When the notch attaches, the app appears in the list as Notched.
3. If an app never appears, stop and restart playback in it. Some players only announce their audio when playback starts, and a few never do; those cannot be notched.
4. Turn off any other equalizer app while using this. Two apps fighting over the same audio give unpredictable results.
5. This mode uses Android's built-in equalizer, so the cut is shallower than the in-app player. Raise Cut depth if the notch sounds weak, and prefer the in-app player for your main daily listening.

Track progress

1. Progress counts notched listening time per day against your goal.
2. On Progress, open Weekly check-in once a week (loudness, bother and sleep quality), starting before your first session.
3. Re-match your tone every month or so. Tinnitus pitch can drift, and the notch should follow it.

Settings

• Settings is the gear at the top of the main screens.
• Start on picks the screen the app opens to: Listen, Music library, Sleep, Bedside clock, Tune, Progress, or Where I left off. Until you save your first tone match, it opens on Tune.
• Appearance: match the phone, or always light or dark. The sun and moon button at the top switches it quickly.
• Daily listening goal, the notch for other music apps, this guide and About are also here.
• Support the developer offers optional tips through Google Play. They unlock nothing; every feature is free.

What the research says

• Notched music training comes from Okamoto, Pantev and colleagues (2010). Removing the band around the tinnitus pitch is meant to let the surrounding frequencies inhibit the overactive part of the hearing system.
• Early small studies found reduced tinnitus loudness. Later and larger controlled trials were mixed, and several found no clear advantage over unnotched sound.
• It tends to suit tonal tinnitus below about 8 kHz and depends on an accurate pitch match. It is low risk at sensible volumes, but it is not a proven cure.