My three-year-old had a hearing test coming up. At that age it is done as a sound
field test: tones played through a speaker in the room rather than through
headphones, with the audiologist watching for a response. Unfamiliar room,
unfamiliar person, unfamiliar sound - we wanted to take at least one of those out
of the equation before the day.
The key to a calm appointment was not explaining the test to a three-year-old; it
was making the sound boring before we got there. So I built a small
warble tone generator, now living at warble.allanson.org. In the
week before the appointment my kid pressed the start button roughly a hundred
times, dragged the sliders around, and turned the whole business into a familiar
game instead of a mystery. Playing existing recordings was considered, but the
button is the point: pressing start yourself makes it your sound, not something
done to you.
