It’s not just the auditory cortex that is affected when people get tinnitus.
Neuroscientists, using increasingly sophisticated brain scans, are finding that changes ripple out across the entire brain.
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/26-ringing-in-the-ears-goes-much-deeper
Each nerve hair is tuned to a particular frequency of sound and excites only certain neurons in the auditory cortex
. As a result, the neurons in the auditory cortex form what is known as a tone map.
The neurons at one end of the auditory cortex are tuned to low frequencies; the farther you go toward the other end, the higher the tuning of the neurons.