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 easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 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 may use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press 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. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: 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 are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the individual carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t get any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Instead of only looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters 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 is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as 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 sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur 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 educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.
