The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover 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.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most common types 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 factor is pitch or tone which assesses 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. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
For 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 delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing 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 gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead measures your ability to hear words being spoken. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to 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.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have any visual cues to help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud particular sounds need 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
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can happen at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to know everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble 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 may be.