If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might recall 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 common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 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 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.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side 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 kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other cases, the person doing the test will say 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 keeps you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Instead of only looking at the volume or threshold required 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 may help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having difficulty 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.