If you’ve had a hearing test done before, you probably sat for a pure tone test. This is the most common type of hearing test. You wear a pair of headphones that play a series of beeps into your ear. When you hear a beep, you raise your hand. These beeps will go up and down in volume and high and low in pitch to determine the quietest volume you can hear each pitch.
This test is valuable, but sometimes it doesn’t get the whole picture. Hearing loss is complex, and everyone is unique. That’s where speech-in-noise testing comes in.
What Happens During a Speech-In-Noise Test?
At first, a speech-in-noise (SIN) hearing test will look similar to a pure tone test: quiet room, headphones. However, the audio played through the headphones this time won’t be beeps. Instead, it will play the sound of speech—a series of words or sentences—over background noise. This background noise could sound like white noise, ambient noise (like ocean waves or rain) or chatter.
Instead of raising your hand, you’ll be asked to repeat what was said. You’ll do this for a couple of different scenarios, each time with the volume of the speech getting louder or quieter and the volume and type of the background noise changing.
This test mimics a realistic situation that many of us encounter daily—a particularly difficult situation for people with hearing loss: holding a conversation in a crowded or noisy place. It reflects how your hearing loss affects you in daily, realistic scenarios.
Why Do a Speech-In-Noise Test?
By mimicking a real-world scenario, your audiologist can get a better understanding of how well your ears and brain work together to focus on speech and filter out background noise. This kind of insight isn’t readily available in a pure tone test.
A SIN test can be done with your hearing aids in. If you are already a hearing aid user, a SIN test can help you and your audiologist evaluate how effective your hearing aids are in environments with lots of background noise.
If you’ve had a hearing test recently and your results say you have no hearing loss, yet you still feel as though you’re having difficulties, a SIN test may provide clarity.
Whatever the results of your pure tone test or your speech-in-noise test, our experts are here to help you every step of the way in your hearing health journey. Contact Beneficial Hearing Aid Center today to make an appointment.