A Guide to Your Hearing Test Results

When you get the results from your hearing test, you may be feeling a little bit perplexed. Your audiologist is going to go through everything with you so that you can thoroughly understand the results. Nevertheless, it does help if you can have a little bit of background knowledge regarding how the results are presented and how to read them. That is why we have put this blog post together; to give you a better understanding of your hearing test results.

Intensity is Measured in Decibels

Firstly, the intensity of the sound is basically what we would call loudness. We use decibels to measure the intensity. Piano practice and normal conversation, for instance, tend to be in the decibel range of 60 to 70. If you are frequently exposed to sounds that are more than 90 decibels, this can result in hearing loss. To put this into perspective, a standard lawn mower will operate at 107 decibels. On your audiogram, the intensity will be either on the vertical or y-axis of results. 

Frequency is Measured in Hertz

On the horizontal or the x-axis of the audiogram, you are going to see the measurement of frequency. This displays the sound wave frequency, which is measured in Hertz, although it is not uncommon to see this abbreviated to Hz. You will read the numbers starting from the left and moving to the right, with sounds being represented from low to high frequency. To put this into perspective, the average frequency for a cat’s purr is approximately 22 Hz, whereby the highest note on a piano will be just below 4,100 Hz. 

Reading the Audiogram Itself

The audiogram that you receive is going to chart the threshold of your hearing at every frequency. For those who are unaware, a threshold is defined by the intensity at which the tone is hardly detected 50% of the time. When you have a hearing exam, your audiologist is going to repeat the same frequency at various intensities. They may repeat the test a further few times.

It is for this reason that you can expect a hearing test to take longer when compared with a health screening. If you are struggling to understand your audiogram and what it means in terms of your hearing, the best thing to do is ask questions to your audiologist. You may even want to think about taking a notepad with you in case you need to jot anything down while you are at the appointment. 

While your hearing test may simply appear like a lot of different lines on a page, it will provide you with some critical information about the condition for your hearing. Of course, we must stress that you should not be able to ask your audiologist any sort of questions that you may have about your results either.