If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might remember 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. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key component. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming 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 required 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 are 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 speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other situations, the individual doing the test will say words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth keeps you from lip reading (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in determining whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, 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 have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. People 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 happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.