If you haven’t had your hearing tested since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing issues and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of your hearing health. 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 only express the intensity of a sound. 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 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 a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you put on a pair of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems scary but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. 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.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked on one side 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 type of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other situations, the individual doing the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, 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 help you, and because they are only speaking single words, you won’t have any context to fall back on. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to differentiate.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to 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 identify.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a little uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially changes the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s a problem with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is functioning.
Your ears have reflexes that are tested by a similar probe. When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist measure the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues occur in the little bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty 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.