If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, 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. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A full 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 gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch 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 attached 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. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
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 difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test evaluates your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the individual performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to help you. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise required to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals 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 small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.