If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full 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 normally 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. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring about 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 connected to an audiometer. You might also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. 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’re experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s lips, you won’t have any visual cues to assist you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a bit uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
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. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound 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.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, give us a call and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to maintain healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.