I just discovered a very interesting program on the internet. A home hearing test that uses pure tones generated by your computer! There is a free trial version that tests several frequencies. The tones must be calibrated for each computer, so in order for it to be functional, you need someone with good hearing or someone with a recent audiometric test to set the tones accurately. Once it is calibrated, the subject presses the CTRL key or a joystick whenever he hears a tone and the program automatically produces a graph of hearing levels at different frequencies.

I set the tones to my hearing levels. I have an audiometer, but if you have a young person with good hearing around, you could get reasonably accurate results by calibrating it to 0 db at every frequency. (0 db is average normal hearing for a young adult.)  This took about 5 minutes. I just used my ipod headphones for this experiment. They worked fine, but higher quality, noise blocking headphones are recommended.

The frequencies included in the free trial are 500hz to 2000hz. People with noise-induced hearing losses generally have a loss in the 4000hz range, so the free trial version won’t pick that up. When I do hearing screenings, I test 500hz to 4000hz, which is the range of most speech. The full version of this program produces tones from 125hz to 8000hz.

This could be fun just to play with, or useful for a screening for all your family members. Of course, if you had any concerns, you would need to have full testing done by an audiologist.

 

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I have no connection to this company—Esseraudio.com–I just thought this was cool!