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 instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you probably recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll obtain 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
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). 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 around 50-60 Hz, and general 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 connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead evaluates your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other cases, the person carrying out 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 mouth, 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. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Instead of simply looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a possible issue such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary 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 occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.