If you haven’t had your hearing tested since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. The good news: Hearing tests are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A full audiometry test is more involved than what you might recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. There are three common 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. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which sounds alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll track the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are functioning, will be gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This kind of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. 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.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker keeps you from reading lips (something you might not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Instead of simply looking at the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry evaluates your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also aid in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear automatically contract when you are exposed to loud noise. Knowing the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with extreme hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, issues with the eardrum and/or little 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 recognize everything that’s happening 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 possible treatment options might be.
