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Background: Tinnitus is a rather heterogeneous chronic condition/disorder which is difficult to treat. Some tinnitus treatments combine sound therapy with counselling. The main goal of this study is to report the efficacy of a customized sound therapy combined with counselling on a cohort of 83 tinnitus patients. Methods: 119 tinnitus subjects, recruited between January 2018 and June 2021, were subjected to a treatment consisting of a combination of an initial counselling session and four-month sound therapy. The sound stimulus was a personalized broadband noise colored by the audiometry of the subjects. These stimuli were given to the patients in mp3 format to be heard 1 h per day over 4 months. The tinnitus severity of the patients was evaluated monthly through the validated Spanish version of the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory. Results: Of the patients, 30% (36 of 119) withdrew from the treatment before finishing, and 96% (80 of 83) of the subjects completing the therapy attained some relief after 4 months. The overall average THI decrease of these 80 participants was 23. However, when the THI was analyzed by severity scales, it was found that patients with initial mild, moderate, severe and catastrophic handicap had an average THI decrease of 14, 20, 31 and 42 points, respectively. Thus, the average THI decrease depended on the baseline severity scale of patients. Conclusions: Consequently, the proposed treatment was demonstrated to be effective in providing clinically relevant relief in tinnitus distress patients in just 4 months.

Noise mapping is a useful and widespread method to visualise various items like the exposure to noise pollution, statistics of affected population, different noise source contribution analysis, and it is also a useful tool in designing noise-control plans. Some researches have moved a step further, proposing maps to represent the people perception of the acoustic environment. Most of these maps use colours as mere tools to display the spatial variability of acoustic parameters. In this paper the colours associated by interviewed people to different urban soundscapes have been analysed, and the possibility of using meaningful colours to represent the soundscape quality in noise mapping has been examined. For this purpose, correspondence analysiswas applied on the data collected fromon-site interviews, performed in the water front of Naples and its surroundings. The outcomes show that in the pedestrian areas nearby the sea, the blue colour was often associated with the soundscape rating, whereas in the areas nearby the sea but open to road traffic the interviewees selected mainly the blue and grey colours. In the areas away from the sea, a wider selection of colours was observed: red and greywere predominantly selected in the areas open to road traffic and green, yellow and red in the green areas.

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Even barely detectable levels of infrasound are often reported to cause annoyance and complaints. We carefully measured the individual sensation threshold of a pure tone and recorded immediately after the brain's frequency-following response (FFR) at this intensity using the same stimulator. In contrast to 87-Hz tones, 8-Hz tones elicit an FFR already at sensation threshold. Control stimuli with trains of 1-kHz tone pips having the repetition rate of the infrasound tone frequency and sensation threshold intensities evoked no significant FFR. Thus, slow periodicity, causing synchronous activation of auditory nuclei, is not explaining the FFR to low-level infrasound alone.