The audiogram’s inverted axis breaks standard scientific plotting convention

Evidence

The interested reader is referred to the short section in Chapter 1 that discusses the historical reasons for plotting the audiogram “upside down” and for using dB HL. Jerger (1990) notes that plotting the audiogram in this way is rather unfortunate because it breaks with scientific convention, where values on y-axes are plotted in an ascending manner. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 280

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did audiology adopt the upside-down audiogram historically? Worth chasing up the Ch. 1 rationale and Jerger 1990.
• CANDY: A light conversation fact: audiograms are plotted upside down relative to all other scientific graphs.