Our doctors are here to share their knowledge on the audiogram, a graph used to illustrate how you hear during a hearing evaluation. Across the top of an audiogram are the frequencies, or pitches, of sounds, from low sounds to high and down the side are measures of intensity, or loudness, of sounds, from soft sounds to loud. Each frequency (pitch) is tested at different intensities (loudness) to determine where your baseline hearing falls. When there are no problems with hearing you will see a straight line drawn across the “0” axes, showing that you can hear all frequencies at the lowest level expected by humans. As hearing begins to fail, you need to increase the loudness of frequencies in order to hear them. This is indicated on an audiogram by data points at higher intensitities.
The audiogram shown below is a great depiction of where certain sounds fall on the audiogram, most importantly is the portion in the middle called the “Speech Banana.” This is a depiction of where the sounds in speech fall in terms of pitch and loudness. It is our goal to have people hear above the speech banana with or without amplification. In the speech banana, you can find the sounds a, u, i, sh, s, m, better known as the Ling Six Sounds. These sounds span the length of the Speech Banana. When a listener responds to a Ling Six Sound Check, we can be reasonably sure that he has access to all of the sounds of speech.
If you have any questions on your hearing or audiogram feel free to contact us and we’ll help you to better understand the results of your most recent test.