The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s normally not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Instead of just focusing on the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in determining whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.