Whether you are a professional who depends on your hearing to make a living or simply a music lover or a hi-fi enthusiast, this is the right time of the year for a hearing test. After enjoying at least a week away from the daily routine, preferably after relaxing holidays (and hopefully with some time away from your headphones to actually hear the wind or the ocean), this is a good moment to evaluate what you hear.

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I would strongly recommend anyone depending on his or her hearing abilities to regularly visit a hearing care professional. Still, if you want a simple way to just check your own hearing, before you consider a doctor visit, there are really simple ways to do it. In fact, with smartphones and apps, it's never been easier. No other special equipment is required. Just download one of the many available apps - search for Hearing Test, Audiology or Audiogram in your app store - and use your favorite headsets or earbuds to perform the step-by-step tests.

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Whatever platform you have, it's easy to find free or affordable apps to do simple listening tests and determine if your hearing is within normal range, or if you have a hearing loss. Audiologists in universities have actually approved some of those audiology apps for smartphones and tablets.

For the iPhone/iPad, I have tried Hearing Test Pro Free (by Up With Apps), Siemens Hearing Test (by Sivantos), Hearing Test Pro (by Cateater), EarMeter (By Elisa Valeria Distefano), and uHear (By Unitron Hearing). Some of those and other apps are also available for Android.

There are online tests as well. I recommend myhearingtest.net and there's a very useful general online resource for audiograms, quick tests, and calibration: www.audiocheck.net.

But there are other good reasons to do such tests. Much in the same way as we like to permanently evaluate new audio equipment and new options for our music enjoyment activities, we should also evaluate and understand our own listening abilities. Doing so will help us understand how far can we actually go in judging an audio setup, a pair of speakers, or headphones.

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Using those online tools or mobile apps, we can actually do very simple experiments that will help us understand what differences those systems can actually make to our own listening abilities. By following simple frequency and intelligibility tests at multiple levels, we can actually obtain results in a graph (an Audiogram) determining how much we can actually hear. Those tests are also great to determine our hearing sensitivity - the quietest sounds we can hear - and our ability to hear sounds in the presence of noise, which should give us an indicator of how much we are trained to hear, if we are getting hear fatigue, or affected by overexposure to loud levels as part of our work and we should consider using more protection.

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An audiogram is actually a great way to compare the results of our own subjective impressions when listening to new speakers and headphones, with some actual measurements of what we hear and how much loudness we should need to accurately get an impression of an audio system or even a music mix. I personally have used this method when evaluating headphones with surprising results. By performing audiogram tests using a sequence of different headphone models I was able to attest to their frequency linearity, definition, dynamics, and sensitivity, as judged by my own unique (and imperfect) hearing abilities.

What Do We Like?

I would like to recommend the study "Musical Preferences are Linked to Cognitive Styles" by David M. Greenberg, Simon Baron-Cohen, David J. Stillwell, Michal Kosinski and Peter J. Rentfrow, just published in the online journal PLOS ONE. Click here to read it.

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