Tinnitus is one of the common clinical diseases, which can occur alone or as a concomitant symptom of other diseases. In 2014, the American Tinnitus Clinical Practice Guidelines defined tinnitus as the sound perceived in the absence of relevant external auditory stimulation [1]. This abnormal sound is often described by patients as cicadas chirping, buzzing, or electric-like hiss or more complex, hard-to-describe sounds [2,3]. At present, there are many classifications of tinnitus [4,5], among which the most practical is the diagnostic classification, which divides tinnitus into primary tinnitus (subjective tinnitus) and secondary tinnitus (objective tinnitus).

Objective tinnitus refers to the abnormal sound that can be perceived by the examiner [6], which only accounts for about 5 % of the tinnitus population. Due to the lack of clinical detection indicators, this type of tinnitus is easy to be ignored or misdiagnosed. According to whether the tinnitus described by the patient was synchronized with the heartbeat rhythm, the objective tinnitus was divided into synchronous pulsatile tinnitus and asynchronous pulsatile tinnitus. The occurrence of the former is mostly related to vascular diseases, and it has been divided into venous tinnitus and arterial tinnitus according to vascular types in previous literature [7,8]. The latter is mostly caused by the lesions of the eustachitro tube or temporomandibular joint [9]. Subjective tinnitus is caused by abnormal activities in the auditory system, only the patient's own can be heard, and it is difficult to establish a relationship with known diseases. It is a disease with many causes, complex pathogenesis, and difficult treatment in clinical practice. The subject of this paper is subjective tinnitus.

Tinnitus has become one of the major health problems in the world. Epidemiological survey estimates that the prevalence of tinnitus in the domestic population is as high as 10 %–30 % [10]. A large survey from the United States shows that 5 % of workers who have never been exposed to occupational noise suffer from tinnitus, and 2 % of patients have tinnitus and hearing impairment [11]. Among these workers, the incidence of tinnitus was 15 % and 9 %, respectively. According to the Guidelines for the Clinical Application of Tinnitus, more than 50 million people in the United States complain of tinnitus, with an incidence of 10 %–15 % [1]. According to a Norway study, 21.3 % of men and 16.2 % of women experienced tinnitus, and 4.4 % of men and 2.1 % of women suffered from high-intensity tinnitus [12]. Nowadays, the prevalence of tinnitus not only shows a progressively rising trend, but the affected population is gradually getting younger due to the popularization of electronic products, changes in people's eating and living habits, and the rapid development of industry and economics. Humphriss et al. [13] reported that the prevalence of spontaneous tinnitus in 11-year-old children was 28.1 %. The prevalence of “clinically significant” tinnitus was 3.1 %. Tinnitus is correlated with patients' age and hearing loss and brings different degrees of mental stress to patients [14,15], nearly one-tenth of patients with severe tinnitus may be associated with anxiety, depression, irritability, insomnia, cognitive dysfunction, and suicide tendency in severe cases. All these negative emotions will lead to a substantial decline in patients' quality of life [[16], [17], [18]]. In short, tinnitus is a serious global disease that seriously affects the physical and mental health of patients and increases the health economic burden of individuals, families, countries, and societies.

There is great clinical demand for tinnitus, but current attempts to treat it by various means have not achieved satisfactory results. The main reasons are that the pathogenesis of tinnitus is still unclear, and second, there are numerous risk factors and intricate clinical characteristics associated with tinnitus. Both medication therapy and non-pharmacological therapy are used in the traditional treatment of tinnitus. The latter mainly include acupuncture therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, tinnitus training, hearing loss intervention (hearing AIDS), neurostimulation therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and other treatments (such as masking therapy, and sound therapy) [19]. Tinnitus can be treated with any of these therapies, although their effectiveness is not well demonstrated. Moreover, due to the complexity of tinnitus, a comprehensive multidisciplinary treatment is often required. The concept of music therapy aims to integrate tinnitus sounds into a musically controlled acoustic process [20]. This study seeks to assess the efficacy of this novel idea in the treatment of tinnitus in clinical practice.