If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might 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. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which assesses the frequency of sound. 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 related to tone or pitch), with average 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 hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called 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 minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have problems hearing (which can be a key 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 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 sound. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, 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 help you. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Rather than only looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also help in assessing whether hearing aids could help.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. 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 displays how well your eardrum functions, which can indicate whether there’s a potential problem such as impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent 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 problems occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to preserve healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.