A 67-year-old woman hears a fluttering sound in her left ear when she moves her eyes far to the left. Sometimes, she says, it is loud enough that her husband can hear it standing close to her.
Neuroscientists at Duke University placed a small microphone in her ear canal and recorded the sound. When they played an amplified version back to her, she said it resembled what she hears.
The work, by Cynthia D. King, Tingan Zhu, and Jennifer M. Groh, is described in a preprint posted to bioRxiv, most recently updated May 21, 2026. It has not been peer-reviewed. The researchers say it links a tiny muscle in the middle ear to the way eye movements reach the ear.
She Contacted the Lab Studying Her Symptom
The woman reached out to the Duke team after learning about its research on how eye movements affect hearing. She had been diagnosed with tensor tympani myoclonus, a spasm of a small muscle in the middle ear that helps regulate how sound is transmitted. StatPearls describes the condition as rare and notes that it can produce sounds others can hear.
She visited the lab twice in late summer and fall of 2023. Her hearing and middle ear function tested normal. The team did not consider superior semicircular canal dehiscence, a common cause of hearing sounds with eye movement, to be responsible, because she lacked its typical symptoms, such as hearing loss, balance problems, and hearing her own body sounds too loudly.
The sound required a specific, extreme movement. It reliably appeared when she moved her eyes from about 30 degrees to the right to about 32 degrees to the left, a sweep of roughly 62 degrees. It did not occur when she started from looking straight ahead.
Tracking such extreme eye movements proved tricky. The lab's eye tracker could not fully measure them, so the team filmed the tracker's display with a phone camera and synced the video with the audio.
Researchers placed an earbud microphone in her left ear and had her tap a second microphone each time she heard the sound. Each tap lined up with a burst in the ear recording. The sounds lasted about a second and occurred mostly while her eyes were held in the far-left position, not just during the movement itself.
Eardrums That Move When the Eyes Move
The case builds on a surprising discovery the same lab reported years earlier. In a study described by Duke, Groh's team found that simply moving the eyes makes the eardrums vibrate, even in silence. Those vibrations begin slightly before the eyes move, suggesting that the same brain commands reach both systems.
"It's like the brain is saying, 'I'm going to move the eyes, I better tell the eardrums, too,'" Groh said at the time.
Researchers call these signals eye movement-related eardrum oscillations. They are faint enough to require sensitive microphones, and the team believes they are present in everyone with normal hearing. A study in PNAS found that the signals carry detailed information about eye movements.
The scientists think these signals help the brain match what we see with what we hear, even though the eyes jump about three times per second. Normally, people never notice them.
Her Ear Signals Were Unusually Large
The team also had the woman make smaller, standard eye movements while recording from her ear and compared her results with 30 people who had normal hearing and no known auditory problems.
Her eardrum signals were larger than the group average by roughly 50% to 300%, depending on the measurement, and began earlier and lasted longer. Individual comparisons were less dramatic: on some measures, a few control participants had larger signals. Even so, she could not hear the signals during these smaller movements, suggesting they must be larger still to become audible.
The authors concluded that eye movement signals reach the tensor tympani muscle and that when the muscle malfunctions, those signals can produce sounds a person actually hears. Unpublished work from the lab tentatively suggests a healthy tensor tympani helps keep the signals small. The authors cautioned that the muscle is not the only mechanism involved, since other middle ear and inner ear components also contribute.
A New Clue for a Known Kind of Tinnitus
Hearing sounds linked to eye position is known as gaze-evoked tinnitus. It has mostly been seen in people with acoustic neuromas, benign tumors on the hearing nerve, and after surgery to remove them. The authors cite an estimate that 19% of patients develop it after one type of operation.
The researchers suggest their findings may help explain those cases. When hearing input from one side is lost or damaged, the brain may struggle to separate eye movement signals from real sound and may interpret them as noise.
Important limits apply. This is a single patient; the eye tracker could not precisely measure her most extreme movements, and the findings have not been peer-reviewed. Surgery has not been recommended for her muscle spasm.
Middle ear myoclonus can cause clicking or buzzing sounds and is treated with medications, surgery, and, more recently, Botox injections, according to Cleveland Clinic. People who notice sounds tied to eye movements, new ringing or clicking in one ear or other hearing changes should see a doctor or audiologist, since conditions ranging from inner ear problems to tumors can cause similar symptoms.
Key Questions Answered
What does the woman hear?
She hears a fluttering sound in her left ear after large eye movements to the far left, sometimes loud enough for her husband to hear.
What is the tensor tympani?
It is a small muscle in the middle ear that helps regulate sound transmission. She has been diagnosed with spasms of this muscle.
How did researchers show the sound was real?
They placed a microphone in her left ear canal and recorded bursts of sound that matched the moments she reported hearing it.
Do everyone's eardrums move with their eyes?
Research from the same Duke lab shows eardrums vibrate slightly with eye movements in people with normal hearing, but the signals are normally too faint to hear.
Is this finding confirmed?
Not yet. The study is a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed, and it describes a single patient.
Published by Medicaldaily.com
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