The majority of 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 easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in 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 range 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. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. A lot 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 pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, 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. 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 help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud particular sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also help in determining whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little 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 identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.