If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you may remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the individual carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. People with extreme hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.