Most individuals aren’t proactive about their hearing health 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 simple, painless, and supply a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for diagnosing hearing problems 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 probably recall from your childhood, but you will get a deeper understanding of the health of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One factor that we use to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is calculated in decibels (dB). Tone, what we conversationally think of as pitch, is another key component. 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 associated with tone or pitch), with average speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the spectrum of frequencies that a healthy human ear can hear.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a pair of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. You might also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Much 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 track the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. In other words, this test gauges how well your ears are working: What range of sound you have difficulty hearing (which can be an essential indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are suffering from hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This test also makes use of headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other circumstances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Hearing individual words means you can’t depend on context to understand what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth stops you from reading lips (something you might not even know you’ve been doing). Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be difficult for people suffering from high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which calculates how loud certain sounds need to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help determine.
Immittance audiometry
This kind of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will permit your hearing specialist to determine if there’s an issue with your eardrum such as earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
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. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to determine the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise needed to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals who have profound hearing loss.
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 essential to include to know everything that’s happening with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! If you have hearing loss or tinnitus, we can help educate you on how to preserve healthy hearing, and what your potential treatment options might be.