Understanding Your Audiogram

Once you’ve had a hearing test carried out, you’ll be left with a set of results that need to be interpreted. Our audiologist will talk you through all of the various aspects of your hearing performance that need to be understood. It might seem a little complicated at first, but our professionals will assist you. This guide will give you a basic overview of what to expect and how your audiogram will be explained to you, so read on to find out more.    

Frequency or Pitch

The frequency or pitch of sounds will dictate your range of hearing to a large extent, and it’s measured in Hertz (Hz). When looking at your audiogram, you’ll see the frequencies measured from low to high, moving from left to right on the audiogram. You’ll see a range of lines representing different frequencies and how well you can hear them, and your audiologist will explain these to you.

Intensity

The name given to the decibel levels you’re capable of hearing is the intensity. When measuring sounds in decibels, it tells us how loud or soft the sound is, and this is displayed in terms of intensity on the audiogram chart. The softest sounds are displayed at the top with the louder sounds at the bottom. The audiogram will tell you what the softest sounds you can hear are.

Right Ear and Left Ear Performance

As part of the hearing test, it’s important to assess how each ear performs separately. That way, it can be determined whether one ear has a greater range of hearing than the other. When looking at the audiogram, the left ear is displayed with an X or square, and the right ear is displayed with a triangle or circle. Your audiologist will be able to point out how each ear is performing in relation to the other.

The Speech Test

Another thing your audiogram will be able to tell you is how easy or challenging you find it to understand speech. This is what the speech test is for and is conducted using spoken words that are delivered through headphones without background noise. Your audigoloist will tell you how well you were able to perform speech discrimination and word recognition.

The Degree of Hearing Loss

The whole point of the hearing test and audiogram is to find out the quality of your hearing and whether you’re experiencing any hearing loss. If you do have hearing loss, the audiogram will tell you what kind of hearing loss you have and the degree of your hearing loss. It could be none or severe depending on what your audiogram tells you, as well as various degrees in between.

As you can see, there are many different aspects involved in the analysis of audiogram data. If you want to have an audiogram carried out by a professional and help with correctly interpreting the results, don’t hesitate to get in touch and our audiologist will be more than happy to help you.