Hearing Tests & Audiological Evaluations

Did you know that your middle ear cavity starts with the eardrum (scientific term for this is the tympanic membrane) and is an air-filled cavity that houses the 3 smallest bones in your entire body? Those three bones together make up the ossicular chain. The bones are called by their Latin names as the malleus, the incus and the stapes, but you might have heard them referred to as the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. They were given these names because of their distinctive shape.

We use a machine called an impedance bridge to measure the movement of the eardrum. This test is called a tympanogram. With this test, we put a small earplug into your ear canal and send a little bit of pressure which makes the eardrum move back and forth. You will feel a little bit of air, as if someone is blowing into your ears. This test is extremely quick and doesn’t hurt – even babies don’t mind it! Using this same machine, we also make sure those little bones in the middle ear are working the way they’re supposed to. The job of these little bones is to contract in response to loud sounds to protect our inner ear from damage. We test for this by sending in loud beeps in the ear and we look for them to respond on the computer.

This test is a measure of your hearing acuity. We call this test an audiogram hearing test. To assess this, you will be seated in a soundproof booth.

If you don’t like small spaces or sometimes get claustrophobic, don’t worry. We built our booth in a glass office, specifically to make it feel comfortable and airy, and our patients tell us that it helps them a ton! Plus, it’s pretty! The audiologist will place foam earphones into your ears and will test the levels at which you hear sounds.

We typically start with words. We present words to you. Sometimes, the words will be nice and loud. Other times, they will be extremely soft. Your job is to simply repeat what you hear, even when the words go down to a whisper and you can barely identify what is being said to you. The next test that we do is the beeps test. With this test, you will hear beeps in each of your ears. The beeps will change in pitch and loudness and they will get gradually softer and softer. Again, your job here will be to simply let us know when you hear a beep. Based on your responses, we graph the results of your hearing test. This graph is called is an audiogram. It tells us what your hearing threshold is for sounds of different pitches. Your hearing threshold is the softest sounds that you can hear. In children, we do the same test to get the same measures, but when we can’t get the earphones on, then we use speakers in the sound booth and toys to encourage responses to the sounds that they hear.