Most individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 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 don a pair of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear 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 type 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. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Instead of simply looking at the volume or threshold required 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 determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might 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 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! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying 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 exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful 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 know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options might be.