Music, Hearing Science, and Resilience: Dr. Raymond Goldsworthy’s Mission to Improve Cochlear Implants

Dr. Raymond Goldsworthy (PhD) grew up near Lexington, Kentucky and describes himself as having had the childhood of a fairly typical American boy in the 1980s. He liked skateboarding, Star Wars, and music, and he began playing the drums around the age of 12 or so. While he gravitated toward puzzles, games, and mathematics as a kid, he always assumed he would become a teacher rather than a scientist. At the age of 13, however, his life trajectory took a drastic turn when a case of spinal meningitis (an infection of the fluid and membranes around the brain and spinal cord) led him to completely lose his hearing over the course of just a single week. For the next year, Goldsworthy continued to attend a mainstream school, trying to adjust academically and socially to being the only deaf person in an environment where everyone else could hear.

At the age of 14, Goldsworthy’s life again took a drastic turn when he was enrolled in a pediatric trial for cochlear implants. A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is deaf or severely hard-of-hearing. Unlike hearing aids, which amplify sound, cochlear implants bypass damaged parts of the ear and directly stimulate the auditory nerve. It took about 6 to 12 months for Goldsworthy to adjust to the cochlear implant and learn how to navigate its intricacies, but a year out from his surgery, he found he could understand people well enough to understand what they were saying even on the telephone.

Goldsworthy would go on to study physics at the University of Kentucky, but by the end of his undergraduate career, he realized he was more interested in signal processing, a subset of electrical engineering focused on the analysis and optimization of information transmission. In particular, Goldsworthy was interested in studying how acoustic sound information can be translated into an electric stimulation pattern, specifically the mathematics of turning sound into electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, which enables those with cochlear implants to experience hearing. Because of his own life experiences, Goldsworthy found himself driven to enter the field of otolaryngology and to find ways to improve cochlear implants, and he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Health Sciences and Technology from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

During his doctoral studies, Goldsworthy focused on using multiple microphones to develop an improved “look-to-listen” algorithm so that cochlear implant users could more precisely hear whoever or whatever they were looking at. This required engineers to refine their designs of microphone arrays and signal processing chips, and Goldsworthy himself zoomed in on evaluating the mathematics of amplifying the source of the target sound while suppressing everything else. He had a sense of immediacy in considering whether an innovation could improve cochlear implant outcomes given that it could result in better hearing for himself, and whenever he would come up with a new idea for signal processing, he could test it on himself and use his firsthand knowledge to determine its merit before entering into pilot testing with other people.

Unfortunately, there are many ways in which cochlear implants have not improved since they were initially developed. Over the past several decades, there has not been much progress on how well we can stimulate the auditory nerve, which consists of 30,000 neurons, each with slightly different frequency information (like a piano). Because cochlear implants only use 22 electrodes (at most) to stimulate the auditory nerve, there can be limitations to sound quality and speech reception as well as frequency mismatches. To improve these issues, scientists cannot only increase the number of electrodes; rather, they have to figure out ways to get the electrodes closer to the auditory nerve itself. On the plus side, however, technology has led to improvements in connectivity. For instance, smartphones can now directly communicate with the cochlear implant, meaning that a user can listen directly to music from their device.

Goldsworthy was thrilled to join USC’s faculty in 2014, starting with a dual appointment with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Keck School of Medicine of USC (though he now has an additional third appointment in Psychology with the USC Dornsife School of Arts and Letters). He explained that USC stood apart from other schools because of its significant strides in advancing biomedical engineering in implants and pioneering innovations across sensory systems, including retinal implants, pediatric pacemakers, and cochlear implants. Goldsworthy also appreciated the large, dynamic community at USC, enabling him to work with other colleagues in the hearing sciences as well as students of various ages (from high school up to research associates), and he became part of a team of researchers interested in exploring hearing science and music perception.

In fact, Goldsworthy is part of USC’s Center for Music, Brain, and Society, established in 2023 when its director, Dr. Assal Habibi (PhD), Associate Research Professor of Psychology with the Brain and Creativity Institute–USC Dornsife, recognized the need for more rigorous studies of how music and music perception could help health outcomes. Supported by a Sound Health Initiative at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Habibi’s goal was to encourage collaboration among disparate labs at USC, getting people together with different skill sets and different backgrounds to facilitate a strong community music program. This center is pertinent to people with cochlear implants because pitch perception tends to be worse among this population, which can then affect other aspects of music listening like melody perception, tonality, and timbre. However, stimulation timing can serve as a cue that can provide better perception, and Goldsworthy noted that the biggest challenge that he has faced is skepticism from others regarding what is possible: “For music appreciation, some people have said that cochlear implant users cannot appreciate music, and though it takes time and effort, cochlear implant users can achieve high levels of music appreciation and perception.” The issue is that when clinicians and scientists who work with cochlear implant users embrace such pessimism, it biases their treatment and research. Fortunately, most clinicians embrace a “sky’s the limit” philosophy and just use their time with patients to encourage them to broadly explore music.

When Goldsworthy was asked where he sees himself in 10 years, he replied, “I want to be working more directly on signal processing strategies that are implemented on clinical devices. My research has clearly shown the power of perceptual learning for precise stimulation cues. I hope to be working directly on real-time algorithms to encode this information to help cochlear implant users have better pitch perception and sound localization.” He also hopes to continue to lead and to participate in a community devoted to helping cochlear implant users discover, or rediscover, music.