The majority of people aren’t proactive about the health of their hearing 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 tests are simple, painless, and provide a wealth of insight to professional hearing specialists, both for identifying hearing problems and assessing whether interventions like hearing aids are working.
You might not get a lollipop after your full audiometry test, which is more involved than you probably remember from your childhood, but you will get a deeper 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 normally think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only indicate the intensity of a sound. Tone, what we colloquially think of as pitch, is another key factor. At the lower end of the pitch spectrum, a low bass sound measures between 50 and 60 Hertz (Hertz, or Hz for short, is the unit of measurement related to tone or pitch), with normal speech ranging between 500 and 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 put on a set of headphones which are hooked up to an audiometer. Another device that your hearing specialist may use is known as a bone oscillator which simply measures how well sound is conducted by your bones. 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. In other words, this test assesses how well your ears function: What range of sound you have a hard time hearing (which can be a key indicator of whether you’d benefit from hearing aids), and whether you are experiencing hearing loss in both ears equally or if one ear is worse than the other.
Speech audiometry
This type of test measures your ability to accurately hear spoken words, again with sounds being played through headphones. Your hearing specialist will sometimes have you repeat recorded words that you hear 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 can’t 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 fall back on. Words that rhyme, let’s say crime, time, dime, and climb, can be hard for individuals dealing with high-frequency hearing loss to distinguish.
Rather than just focusing on the volume or threshold needed for hearing, as tone testing does, speech audiometry measures your ability to make sense of the sounds you hear. Word recognition testing can also assist in assessing whether hearing aids might help.
Immittance audiometry
This type of testing normally won’t cause pain, but it may 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 shows how well your eardrum is working, which can indicate whether there’s a potential issue like impacted earwax or a perforation.
A related test makes use of 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 sound. Identifying the noise level required for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. Individuals with profound hearing loss don’t exhibit any reflex.
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 happening with your ears.
Are you having difficulty hearing? Get it tested! We can help you better understand your hearing health, inform 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.