Most 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 generally not part of a routine adult physical. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can discover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help evaluate whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
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 greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most common types of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
We typically think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key component. It’s measured in Hertz (no relation to the car rental agency), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
For pure tone testing, you’ll wear headphones or earphones connected to an audiometer. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which sounds scary 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.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear 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 test also uses headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear speech. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the individual carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, 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 difficult to distinguish.
Rather than simply focusing on 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
Okay, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. In tympanometry, a small probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. Your hearing specialist will have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a possible problem 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 needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
Though immittance tests are most helpful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small 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.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, call us and schedule a hearing test! We can help you better comprehend your hearing health, educate you on what you can do to maintain healthy hearing, and let you know what your treatment options are if you have hearing loss or tinnitus.