Warble Tone as an Audiometric Stimulus

Abstract

Pure-tone and warble-tone thresholds were compared for 198 normal-hearing inexperienced adult listeners at six frequencies at octave intervals from 250 through 8000 Hz. Results of the analysis of variance procedures showed statistically significant differences (p less than 0.01) for the test frequencies 500, 2000, 4000, and 8000 Hz. Although significant differences were found at four of the six test frequencies, mean differences were quite small, the largest being 2.3 dB at 8000 Hz. This finding is thought to support the notion that the audiologist may use warble tone with stimulus parameters up to and including frequency deviations of +/- 5% with modulation rates of five per second to measure thresholds, which are directly comparable to pure-tone thresholds for patients with normal hearing and those with relatively flat hearing loss.

The Relationship of Audiometric Thresholds Elicited with Pulsed, Warbled, and Pulsed-Warbled Tones in Adults with Normal Hearing

“…Consistent with past research (Dockum & Robinson 1974;Orchik & Rintelmann 1977), this study observed that pulsed, warbled, and pulsed-warbled tones yielded roughly the same thresholds, with a percent agreement (Ϯ5 dB) between each ranging from 88 to 100%. This agreement is also supported with strong correlation values between thresholds (0.698 to 0.892) recorded using each of the stimuli.…”

“…The measured results, taken together with previous findings (Dockum & Robinson 1974;Orchik & Rintelmann 1977;Mineau & Schlauch 1997;Burk & Wiley 2004), support the use of various audiometric stimuli for hearing threshold measurements with no clinically significant negative effects on the results.…”

“…Dockum and Robinson (1974) compared adult thresholds using pure-tone and warbled-tone stimuli for the octave intervals 250 to 8000 Hz with no interoctave data reported. Results indicated that mean warbled-tone thresholds were consistently better than mean pure-tone thresholds from 250 to 4000 Hz but did not exceed the 5 dB clinical step size for any participant.…”

Comparisons of Auditory Steady State Response and Behavioral Air Conduction and Bone Conduction Thresholds for Infants and Adults With Normal Hearing

“…† †Studies that have assessed AC thresholds to warbled-tone stimuli in normal-hearing adults suggest there is only a small and clinically insignificant difference in mean thresholds acquired using pure-tone versus warbled-tone stimuli(Dockum & Robinson 1975;Franklin et al 2009Franklin et al , 2011.‡ ‡Lins et al(1996) assessed two groups of infants, one of which had considerably higher ambient noise during testing (the Havana group). Thus only the Ottawa infant and adult data were used for comparisons with the present study.…”

Audiometric Testing With Pulsed, Steady, and Warble Tones in Listeners With Tinnitus and Hearing Loss

“…The earliest work focused on testing at standard audiometric frequencies. Dockum and Robinson (1975) tested a large cohort of listeners and established that warble tones yielded lower (better) thresholds (< 3 dB) than steady tones at four of six standard audiometric frequencies, but they argued that the size of the threshold difference was not clinically significant. On the other hand, Barry and Resnick (1978) found that thresholds could be substantially lower for warble tones (> 5 dB) at standard audiometric frequencies.…”