The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine 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 completed, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone spectrum, a low bass sound clocks in 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 a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are hooked up 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 press a button or raise your hand when a tone plays either in your left ear or your right ear.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you’re suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other cases, the person carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from lip reading (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks 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 determine.
Immittance audiometry
Okay, these can be a bit 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 get 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 makes use of 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 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 people 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 little bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
Are you having difficulty 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.
