The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll obtain a much more detailed 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
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 associated with 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 use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary 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 track the lowest 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 test also uses headphones, but instead measures 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 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 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). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Instead of just focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids may help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems 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.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, inform 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.
