The majority of individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you may recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated 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 company), with a low bass sound measuring around 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.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary 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 lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the individual 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 stops you from reading lips (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily 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 needed to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
It’s important 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 occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
