If you haven’t had a hearing exam since you were in grade school, you’re not the only one, it’s often not part of a regular adult physical, and, regrettably, we tend to treat hearing reactively instead of proactively. Fortunately, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing examination which can be used to both diagnose 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 remember 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 reveal.
Pure tone testing
We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels just indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we conversationally refer to as pitch, is another key component. It’s calculated in Hertz (no relation to the car rental company), with a low bass sound measuring around 50-60 Hz, and general speech ranging from 500 to 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 put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist might use is called a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. Pure tones are delivered to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.
We’ll track the lowest volume necessary for you to hear each sound. Whether your hearing loss is more marked 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 gauged by this test.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear speech, again with sounds coming at you through headphones. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the person doing the test will speak words to you, but there’s a catch, you can’t see the person’s mouth.
Because you are unable to see the speaker’s lips, 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 help you. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be challenging for people dealing with 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 measures 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 type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it might be a bit uncomfortable. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure inside of your ear by pushing air in with a small inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will have 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.
Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. Muscles in your ear involuntarily contract when you are exposed to loud noise. It will be easier for your hearing specialist to identify the severity of your hearing loss when they know the level of noise necessary to trigger this reflex. There’s no reflex response in individuals 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 occur at the same time as age- or noise-related hearing loss, it’s important to include to recognize everything that’s going on with your ears.
Are you having trouble hearing? Get it tested! 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.