Efforts to suppress tinnitus for a certain time have been provided by exposing a subject to various sounds and/or tones of different kinds. These so-called “tinnitus masker” treatments comprise an instrument worn on the head like headphones, which generates sinusoidal tones, narrow-band noise, broad-band noise or white noise. However such treatments have proved to have only marginal beneficial effect. Additionally they are time-consuming, very expensive because they involve clinician time, and involve considerable time and difficulty for the patient. In other cases, a standard hearing aid has been found useful, since the hearing aid boosts the overall background noise level and thus allows the patient to distinguish this from his tinnitus.

The physiology of tinnitus is well investigated. Neurons in the brain are held in check by the principles of their action potential. Neurons hold a negative electrical charge so that positively charged signals from neighboring neurons do not cause them to fire by proximity. Neurons must be exposed to a charge strong enough to break this negative threshold in order to fire a positive charge themselves, as illustrated below.