I'm going to run an experiment. Every night before I go to bed, I'm going to turn down the volume on my alarm by one bar on my phone until it's too quite to wake me up and I'm late for work. That will be where my hearing is at. I can then set the alarm to this volume level and if I don't wake up then my hearing must be going! What do you guys think of it?
Nah man, you have to have it past a certain threshold for the SLEEPIEST you could possibly be. Because trust me, there have been times when I smoke too much and get too little sleep, waking up just doesn't happen with a weak ass alarm. I find music works the best, I just put my old iHome (surprisingly useful) set with a good couple songs on my ipod. Even if I am in a deep sleep the musical vibrations seem to always pull me out of it.
Yup, you are totally right, there can be several variable effecting depth of sleep. I wonder if there are any sleep studies where they compare depth of sleep (Using EEG) and test a persons sensitivity to sound. So how about I run this test multiple times under varying circumstances. Some nights I'll go to bed early, some later, some under the use of drugs others sober, and get an average. Next time I want to see where my hearing is at though I'll have to do multiple runs again to get another average.
you could try find the lowest threshhold in terms of db by adjusting it up and down to a setting you can barely detect and then if you can't hear the sound later on , you probably have hearing sound assuming the settings are the same.
No practical hearing test will be conducted on a sleeping person. That is like taking a driving test while you're asleep, makes absolutely no sense.