What to Expect at a Hearing Test

First, we’ll take an inventory of your medical history. This is an important step in that you’re able to give us any recent changes to your hearing life, plus we’ll get a better picture of the full scope of your health. This case history can help us to determine if you’re genetically more predisposed to hearing loss or other hearing conditions or if your hobbies or professional activities impact your hearing.

Changes in hearing health can be impacted by all sorts of other factors because our body’s systems all work together. Communicating a thorough history to our providers will help us understand your issues of concern.

Hearing tests are easy and painless. We’ll physically examine your ear to make sure that the ear itself is healthy and unobstructed. Then, we’ll run through a series of specialized tests that will predominantly require you to listen to sounds in a private, quiet space and report back to us what you hear. If you have testing anxiety, don’t worry! There are no right or wrong answers, it’s simply a matter of reflecting back to us your listening experience.

Pure-tone audiometry
One aspect of your exam will include playing tones at various pitches and volumes. We’ll explain in more detail when you’re here, but our goal is to see which frequencies along the spectrum you can hear at their quietest volumes.

Speech audiometry
Once we have determined the range of frequencies available to you, we’ll use recorded or live speech to discern how you hear verbal conversation. Like the pure-tone test, we’ll present a range of volumes and words and then have you repeat back what you’ve heard.

Speech in noise and words in noise
Because we don’t usually communicate in a quiet, sound-proof room, we’ll also perform tests to see how your hearing fares when background noise is present. As with the speech audiometry test, we’ll play varying phrases and words for you and ask that you repeat them back. This time, however, we’ll also play background noise at increasing volumes. These are more realistic scenarios, and can be slightly more stressful, but not more so that the daily interactions you are already having.

We also use these tests to perform hearing aid fittings, so that when you walk out with hearing aids and into the real world, they are perfectly calibrated to work for you in real-life situations.

Tympanometry
We occasionally perform these tests to examine the movement of your eardrum and the muscles of the middle ear. Using a soft plug that creates pressure and sound placed close to your ear, this test measures reflexive responses.

Once you’ve undergone the appropriate tests, we’ll present you with your results and walk you through understanding your unique hearing pattern. These results are communicated through an audiogram, which is a graph showing your hearing abilities — the softest sounds along the spectrum of frequencies, presented in decibels (the unit of measurement for sound).

If a hearing loss is detected, we will talk to you about the treatment solution options available to you.