Most individuals aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s generally not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you might remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Another important aspect 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 average 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. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are directed to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. 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 working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes ask you to 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 have 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, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to distinguish.
Instead of just looking at the volume or threshold required for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry tracks 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 determine.
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. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test utilizes a similar probe as an auditory tap on the knee, yes, your ears have reflexes! When you hear a loud sound, muscles in your middle ear automatically contract. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the extent of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. 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 problems happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-induced hearing loss.
If you’re having difficulty hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your possible treatment options may be.