If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. Luckily, 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 evaluate whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. There are three common types of hearing tests, each of which will supply different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. 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 related to 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. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which just measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The minimum volume that you can hear the tones will then be tracked. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears function: 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 experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, 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. In other situations, the individual doing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to 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.
Rather than just looking at the volume or threshold required 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
This kind of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked 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 gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or little bones inside the ear, because these can occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s essential to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend 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.