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It's called objective tinnitus. Tinnitus can have different causes, the damaged hair cells one is the most common.

how could it be anything but physical?

The sound? Well, ultimately sounds are just those hairs and your cochlea and eardrum and all that getting hit by vibrations in the air and sending signals to your brain which get interpreted; damage the equipment so it sends signals even when there's no vibrations in the air hitting it, and you have your non-physical sound. Same way phantom limb syndrome works.

However what if the damage doesn't cause signals in the absence of sound? What if tinnitus is actually the cochlea itself (or something/s in the apparatus anyway) physically vibrating and producing that whining sound? Like a mosquito's wings beating.

I have a kind of tinnitus that comes and goes based on how stressed out the tendons in my neck and jaw are, on one side, after a pretty serious physical injury.

I can basically massage away my tinnitus a good deal of the time, its only on the side that got fucked up.

Beyond that, I actually have exceptionally good hearing (for my age at least), and I often hear things other people don't even notice, yay autism!

"you're young, you're healthy", and its like, well clearly I'm not if I can't walk and people are feeding me.

Yup, sounds like a doctor alright

I've had my own fair share of doctors not believing my struggles. Sometimes even directly getting in the way of medical help. And yes, it's incredibly unhelpful.

A violinist, she was told by doctors to give up playing.

i've had doctors recommend similar. i've basically learned MDs gave up all their dreams and they expect us to do so as well

Mawp. Mawp. Mawp.

extremely dumb question, but would a very loud 13kHz sound kill the cochlear cells that detect that specific frequency?

Almost. Tinnitus is constant ear ringing. Like a high pitched, constant noise. It does vary in intensity in people who have it though and is not always noticeable. (I don't have tinnitus, so may not be 100% accurate)

When your brain can't filter out sounds, that is one of the side effects of audio processing disorder. Probably a lot of other things that cause it too. Audio processing disorder is exactly what it sounds like. You can hear, but its hard to understand. Can't filter sounds (you hear all sounds at their actual volume). Sometimes causes people to think I am hearing impaired. Frequently causes me to mishear things as completely different, unrelated sounds. Many people also have difficulty determining which direction noises come from, although I haven't personally experienced this

Wait what??

that's a good philosophy in general. but I'm practice, it's hard.

for every million "that can't be" theories only a handful pan out. doing every "stupid" experiment is practically impossible.

This is literally an example of a scientist being curious about something they don't know and setting up an extremely far fetched experiment.