Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s normally 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 treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key component. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement associated with tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 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 known as a bone oscillator which simply 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 track the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear words being spoken. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background sound. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of just looking at the volume or threshold needed 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
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes 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 sound. 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 people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better comprehend 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.