The majority of people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing 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 provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the tone 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 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. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an integral indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing 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 speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other cases, the person carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, 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 realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks 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. Word recognition testing can also assist in determining whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of 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. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.