Most people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and most likely haven’t had a hearing test since grade school because it’s typically 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 diagnose any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the tone 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 a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll monitor the lowest volume required for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most trouble hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other situations, the individual performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, 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 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 differentiate.
Instead of just focusing on 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. 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 such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
It’s essential 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! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.