I also have a slight bit of tinnitus. I suspect it was caused by years of wind noise on the motorcycle. Yes I wear a helmet, but it's open face. I started noticing my ears ringing loudly for a time after riding. Then one day while stuck under a bridge I had an ambulance flip on it's siren right next to me. I 'bout fell off the bike in pain.

I now ride with earplugs.

Anyway, one day I gave myself a simple hearing test. Being a musician it was no big deal for me to generate tones at various frequencies and see how loud they needed to be to hear them. I have a dip right at the frequency of the tinnitus. Fortunately it's fairly high frequency, narrow, and not very strong. I rarely notice it.

But as for ear tones, it sounds from the descriptions like short bursts of a ringing that fades over seconds (which is what I get sometimes). From the descriptions of otoacoustic emissions, we have a match.

Apparently, otoacoustic emissions are NOT a psychoacoustic effect. The cochlea of the ear is actually emitting the tone and this can be measured with an instrument. From my understanding the purpose is still unknown.

It can also be induced with a 'clicker' placed in the ear. This technique is used to test the hearing in infants since they obviously can't respond verbally yet. If the device does not detect the emission, the child is deaf.

What I'd like to see is if there were some portable device that people could wear in their ear to detect these emissions, and see if they correspond with when people hear spontaneous ear tones. Or maybe, to have these folks have their ears tested with a clicker and see if the induced tone is what they hear spontaneously. Not likely to happen, though. The old saying about not letting the facts get in the way generalizes all the logical fallacies that will be invoked quite nicely.

Brian