The majority of people aren’t proactive about their hearing health and probably 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 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 recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of your hearing health. Here are three of the most prevalent types of hearing tests and what they’ll reveal.
Pure tone testing
We normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which measures 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 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 is able to hear.
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. A lot like that familiar hearing test from your youth, you press a button or raise your hand when a tone sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the minimum volume required 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 working, will be measured by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test tracks your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. Your hearing specialist will, in other instances, have you repeat words they are saying, but their mouths will be hidden from view.
Because you are unable to 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. Rhyming words, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Instead of simply 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 type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it may be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum functions, which can identify whether there’s a possible issue such as 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 automatically contract when you are exposed to loud sound. Knowing the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have profound hearing loss.
Though immittance tests are most helpful 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 recognize everything that’s happening with your ears.
If you’re having a hard time hearing, contact 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 potential treatment options may be.
