The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing 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 tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete 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 gain 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
One factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the pitch 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.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be an essential 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 tracks your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other situations, the person performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a possible problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes 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. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! 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.