If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you may 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 kinds 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 indicate 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 company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 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 set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Much like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. 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 gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the individual doing the test will speak 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 lip reading (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
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 required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. People with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues 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 important 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 inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options might be.