If you haven’t had a hearing exam since your grade school days, you’re not alone, it’s usually not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively rather than proactively. The good news: Hearing exams are easy, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether treatments like hearing aids are working.
A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you may recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s completed, but you’ll gain a much more detailed understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most common kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.
Pure tone testing
One component that we utilize to measure sound is the intensity or loudness which is measured in decibels (dB). Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. 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 average 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 attached to an audiometer. You might also use 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 sounds either in your left ear or your right ear.
We’ll monitor the lowest 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 a hard time hearing (which can be an integral 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 utilizes headphones, but instead measures 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 person doing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a surprise, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Hearing individual words means you can’t rely on context to comprehend what’s being said, and being unable to see the speaker’s mouth keeps you from reading lips (something you may not even realize you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are difficult to differentiate.
Speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing as opposed to tone testing which measures how loud specific sounds have to be in order to be heard. Whether hearing aids will be helpful is another thing that word recognition testing can help identify.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might 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 have a graph readout that displays how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test uses 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 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 useful in diagnosing conductive hearing loss, problems with the eardrum and/or small bones inside the ear, because these can occur 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 possible treatment options might be.