Understanding your audiogram
The audiogram is a chart that displays the results of your hearing evaluation.
The chart contains an X-axis and a Y-axis. The X-axis shows the different pitches of the sounds that were played to you during your hearing test.
This axis is laid out like piano keys, where low-pitched sounds are on the left and higher pitches are on the right of the graph.
The Y-axis shows the loudness which increases as you go down the graph. The points on the graph show how loud the sounds needed to be for you to hear at each pitch.
Circles (red) are used to symbolise your right ear and crosses (blue) are used to symbolise your left ear.
The horizontal axis (X axis) measures the frequency in Hertz (Hz). This axis is laid out like piano keys, where low-pitched sounds are on the left and higher pitches are on the right of the graph.
The vertical axis (Y axis) on the audiogram represents the hearing loudness in Decibels for Hearing Loss (dB HL). The more one moves down the axis, the louder the sound becomes. The points on your audiogram (not pictured) show how loud the sounds needed to be for you to hear at each pitch.
The icons on the graph indicate the average loudness and frequency (pitch) of certain sounds. For example, distant birds tweeting is more likely to represent soft, high pitch sounds. The white banana-shaped area on the graph represents the average speech spectrum when heard from 1 meter away. Consonants are particularly important components of speech as they tend to carry the meaning behind words.
Depending on the hearing loss, certain speech sounds will be more difficult to hear than others. For example, someone with a high frequency hearing loss is more likely to struggle with ‘t’, ‘th’, ‘s’ sounds. This means words like ‘that’ or ‘sat’ could be misheard as ‘cat’ or ‘fat’, because the consonants are missing, and our brain will try to substitute the sound to make sense of the word. This explains why individuals with a hearing loss often feel that people mumble; because they can hear the speech, but they cannot hear it clearly.
The lines on your audiogram indicate the softest sounds you can hear (not pictured). Everything above your threshold line is no longer within your hearing range. Anything below the 20dB HL line on the graph (louder decibels) indicates a significant hearing loss.
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