If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Another important factor 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum 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. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you push a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged 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 sound. In other cases, the individual carrying out 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 rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker stops you from reading lips (something you might not even recognize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur 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.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform 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.