If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you probably remember from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll obtain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three prevalent types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. 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. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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 monitored. 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 test also uses headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear words being spoken. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken 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 comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from lip reading (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to distinguish.
Rather than only looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s essential to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced 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 preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.
