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. Luckily, a professional hearing specialist can uncover a wealth of information from a hearing test which can be used to both identify any hearing loss and help determine whether utilizing treatments like hearing aids is effective.

A complete audiometry test is more involved than what you might recall from childhood, and you won’t get a lollipop or a sticker when it’s done, but you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of your hearing. Here are three of the most prevalent kinds of hearing tests and what they’ll tell you.

We usually think of sound as measured in decibels, but decibels only express the loudness of a sound. Another important factor is pitch or tone which assesses 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 normal speech ranging between 500 and 3,000 Hz. 20 to 20,000 Hz is the range of frequencies that a healthy human ear is able to 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. You may also wear a device called a bone oscillator which seems alarming but just measures how well your bones conduct sound. Pure tones are presented to one ear at a time, and you signal (by pushing a button or raising a hand) when you hear a sound.

The lowest volume that you can hear the tones will then be monitored. Whether your hearing loss is more pronounced in one ear than the other, what frequency of sound you have the most difficulty hearing, and generally how well your ears are working, will be gauged by this test.

This test also uses headphones, but instead tracks your ability to hear words being spoken. In some cases, you’ll be asked to repeat recorded words that are spoken along with background noise. In other situations, the person carrying out the test will say words to you, but there’s a catch, 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 keeps you from lip reading (something you may not even know you’ve been doing). For people who have hearing loss in the higher frequencies, rhyming words, like climb, time, dime, and crime, are hard to distinguish.

Instead of just 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. Word recognition testing can also help in determining whether hearing aids could help.

Alright, these can be a little uncomfortable, but shouldn’t cause pain. Tympanometry artificially alters the pressure within your ear by pushing air in with a little inserted probe. Your hearing specialist will get a graph readout that shows how well your eardrum is working, which can identify whether there’s a potential problem like impacted earwax or a perforation.

Your ears have reflexes that are checked by a similar probe. When you hear a loud noise, muscles in your middle ear involuntarily contract. Identifying the noise level needed for this reflex can help a hearing specialist determine the extent of hearing loss. People with profound hearing loss don’t demonstrate any reflex.

It’s important to include immittance testing because it helps diagnose conductive hearing loss, which is when problems occur in the small bones inside of the ears and can occur at the same time as age-related or noise-related hearing loss.

If you’re having difficulty hearing, contact us and schedule a hearing test! 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.