Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
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 done, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as 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 sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other cases, the person performing the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for people suffering from 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 particular sounds need 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
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a potential issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.