If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, 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 diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), 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 range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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 tracked. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be an essential 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 type of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, you won’t get any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which measures how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. 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 like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems 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 recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.