For each pitch the sound will be played clearly at an intensity you can hear, it will then be reduced to a level you can no longer hear. You won’t see the groupings on the right hand side on most audiograms The Hearing Testĭuring a hearing test, different sounds will be played at different frequencies and intensities, usually starting at 1Khz (1000 Hz) and progressing through to the high pitches before testing low pitches. If someone was tested on a sound and they heard it at 10 decibels (dB) then they have normal hearing ability for that sound – if they could not hear that sound until it was played at 50dB then they have a moderate hearing loss for that sound. The wording on the right of the audiogram above groups the decibels to show different levels of hearing loss. Vowels have more power, they are formed in your chest and travel well, consonants are formed in your mouth, they don't travel well but they are the sounds that form the clarity of speech. Low frequencies in speech tend to be the vowel sounds in speech, high frequency sounds in speech are the consonant sounds in speech. You may have the ability to hear at higher frequencies than are recorded on the chart or tested, but they are unimportant for the understanding of speech. In essence, all hearing tests undertaken are primarily focused on speech.
These frequencies are tested because they are important frequencies for human speech. The numbers running along the top, from 125 to 8000, represents the frequency or pitch of different sounds, from low pitch (for example a tuba, cannon shot or distant thunder and the vowels in speech) through to high pitch (for example breaking glass, a baby’s scream or a bird singing and the consonants in speech).
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The decibels (-10 to 120) down the left-hand side represent the full safe range of human hearing. The higher the number, the louder the sound. You can see down the left-hand side the numbers starting at -10 and going up to 120 – these numbers represent the decibel level (volume) at which you can hear a particular sound. The audiogram above is empty, no test results have been recorded on it yet. In essence, the audiogram is a record of the lowest sounds you can hear. It is used to determine if a person has a hearing loss, and if so, how bad that loss is. In other words, it is the hearing test graph that we record the hearing test results on to show how well a person can hear different types of sounds.
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How to talk to someone with hearing lossĪn audiogram is a document that we use in Practice to take a record of a hearing test.