If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s usually not part of a routine adult physical, and, unfortunately, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both diagnose any hearing loss and help assess whether using treatments like hearing aids is effective.
You may not get a lollipop after your complete audiometry test, which is more involved than you might recall from your childhood, but you will get a greater understanding of the health of your hearing. There are three prevalent kinds of hearing tests, each of which will provide different perspectives about your hearing.
Pure tone testing
We typically 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. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring about 50-60 Hz, and normal speech ranging from 500 to 3,000 Hz. Healthy human hearing ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
With a pure tone hearing test, your hearing specialist will have you don a set of headphones which are connected to an audiometer. You may also use a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are delivered 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 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 gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This test also uses headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some circumstances, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken while there is background noise. In other cases, the person carrying out the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s mouth, 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 fall back on. For individuals who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, words that rhyme, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Speech audiometry tracks your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing unlike tone testing which calculates how loud specific sounds need to be in order to be heard. Word recognition testing can also aid in determining whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing usually won’t cause pain, but it might be a little uncomfortable. In tympanometry, a little probe is inserted in your ear, and air flows through it to artificially change your ear’s pressure. A graph readout will allow your hearing specialist to identify if there’s a problem with your eardrum like earwax impaction or a perforation, and how well your eardrum is working.
A related test uses 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 noise. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist gauge the extent of hearing loss. There’s no reflex response in people who have extreme 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 important to include to know everything that’s going on 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 possible treatment options may be.