The majority of people 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 information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full 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 done, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s calculated 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are 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. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side 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 evaluates your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, you won’t have any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of only focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates 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 kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit 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.
A related test utilizes 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 sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options might be.