The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key factor. 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 associated with tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test tracks 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 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.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud particular sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. 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 happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us 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.