Most people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing 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 tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the pitch 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 normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached 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. 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.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side 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 type of test evaluates 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 noise. In other cases, the person performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, 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 might not even know you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud certain sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in determining whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit 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 functions, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty 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.