Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely 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 information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 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 set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is known as a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Much 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 monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. In other situations, the individual 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 keeps you from reading lips (something you may not even recognize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry monitors your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud particular sounds need to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful 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 essential to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform 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.