If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 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 attached to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is known as 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 plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll track the minimum volume necessary 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 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 evaluates your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, 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 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 realize you’ve been doing). For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult 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 help in determining whether hearing aids may 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 have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of 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. Identifying 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 extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful 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 essential to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend 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.
