How to Read Your Audiogram

An audiogram is simply a graph of the quietest sounds you can hear. Once you know what the two axes mean, the whole chart opens up — and you can see at a glance where your hearing is strong and where it's slipping.

The two axes: pitch and loudness

Every audiogram has the same layout:

• Left to right is pitch (frequency), measured in hertz (Hz). Low rumbles like a bass drum sit on the left (250 Hz); high sounds like a whistle or a child's voice sit on the right (8,000 Hz).
• Top to bottom is loudness (level), measured in decibels hearing level (dB HL). Quiet sounds are at the top; loud sounds at the bottom.

Here's the part that trips everyone up: down is worse. Because the chart plots the quietest sound you can detect, a point near the top means you hear even faint sounds (great), while a point lower down means a sound has to be made louder before you notice it (not so great).

The higher the line sits on the chart, the better your hearing. A line that drifts downward to the right means you're losing the high pitches first — which is by far the most common pattern.

What the numbers mean

Audiologists group the dB HL levels into bands. Your threshold at each pitch falls into one of them:

• −10 to 20 dB HL — Normal. You hear soft speech and whispers easily.
• 20 to 40 dB HL — Mild. Soft speech and noisy rooms get tricky.
• 40 to 55 dB HL — Moderate. Normal conversation takes real effort.
• 55 to 70 dB HL — Moderately severe. You miss a lot without help.
• 70 dB HL and above — Severe to profound. Even loud speech is hard to follow.

Clinicians often summarise your hearing with a single number, the PTA (pure-tone average) — the average threshold at 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 Hz, the frequencies that matter most for understanding speech.

O for right, X for left

On a clinical audiogram each ear gets its own symbol: a red O (or circle) for the right ear, and a blue X for the left. Comparing the two lines matters. Hearing that's noticeably worse in just one ear — an asymmetry — is something an audiologist always wants to investigate, because it can point to something other than ordinary wear and tear.

The "speech banana"

If you overlay the sounds of human speech onto an audiogram, they cluster in a banana-shaped region across the middle. Vowels (a, o, u) are lower-pitched and louder; consonants like s, f, th and k are high-pitched and quiet — they live in the top-right of the banana.

That's why high-frequency loss makes speech sound mumbled rather than just quiet: you still catch the vowels, but the crisp consonants that carry meaning go missing. People with early high-frequency loss often say they can hear that someone is talking but can't quite make out the words, especially in a noisy room.

That dip at 4 kHz

A very common shape is a notch — a sudden dip — right around 4,000 Hz, with hearing recovering slightly at 8,000 Hz. This noise notch is the fingerprint of noise damage: concerts, power tools, headphones turned up too far.

The 4 kHz region is mechanically vulnerable, so it tends to take the first hit from loud exposure. If you see this notch on your own chart, treat it as an early-warning light rather than a verdict. It's a nudge to start protecting your ears now, before the dip widens into the speech frequencies.

Why the high frequencies go first

The tiny hair cells that detect high pitches sit at the entrance of the cochlea and absorb the brunt of incoming sound energy. Over a lifetime of exposure they wear down sooner than the cells tuned to low pitches, which is why both age-related and noise-related loss usually show up as a downward slope to the right.

When to see a professional

An online screening like ours is a great first look, but book a proper assessment with an audiologist if you notice any of these:

• Sudden hearing loss in one or both ears — this can be a medical emergency, so seek same-day care.
• Hearing that's clearly worse in one ear than the other.
• Hearing loss with pain, discharge, dizziness, or ringing that's new.
• A PTA that lands in the moderate band or worse.

You don't need a medical degree to spot the two things that matter most: how far down the line sits, and whether it slopes off to the right. If you'd like to see your own chart, our free pure-tone hearing test will plot your thresholds — and the AI will read them with you.

A final caveat worth repeating: an at-home test runs on uncalibrated consumer hardware and can't replace a diagnostic audiogram performed by a licensed audiologist. Use it to decide whether a professional assessment is worth booking, not as a diagnosis in itself.