The majority of people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing and most likely haven’t had a hearing screening since grade school because it’s typically not part of a routine adult physical. The good news: Hearing exams are simple, painless, and supply a wealth of information to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing issues and determining whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
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 usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just express the loudness of a sound. Another important aspect is pitch or tone which measures the frequency of sound. At the lower end of the pitch 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 connected to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pressing 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 problems hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also utilizes headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear while there is background noise. In other cases, the person performing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you can’t see the speaker’s mouth, you won’t have 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 people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are challenging to differentiate.
Rather than just focusing on 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 may help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally 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 alter your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows 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! Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have extreme hearing loss.
It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when issues happen in the small bones inside of the ears and can happen at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help inform you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options may be.