Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full 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. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key factor. 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 can hear.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds 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.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, 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 situations, 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 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 recognize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within 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.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Identifying the noise level required 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 happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.
