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 regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help assess whether utilizing 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 done, but you’ll obtain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three common kinds of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially refer to as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures 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 pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones attached to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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 lowest volume required 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 difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
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 might not even realize you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to identify if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. 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 people who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues happen in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen 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 educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.