https://keck.usc.edu/improving-music-appreciation-for-the-worlds-more-than-700000-cochlear-implant-users/
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Improving music appreciation for the world's more than 700,000 cochlear implant users
For more than 700,000 cochlear implant users worldwide, music appreciation is not always what it should be. Dr. Goldsworthy and the Bionic Ear Lab at the USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery are working to change that.
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Sound serves a variety of purposes in our lives. You hear a car's tires screech and you jump back, preserving your life. Someone calls your name from across the room and you turn to see what they want. Speech is one of the primary forms of communication, helping people connect, share their thoughts, give instructions, receive advice and comfort.
And then there's music. Twelve simple tones, played on a variety of instruments and in seemingly endless combinations, music may be the ultimate form of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Music pumps us up at the gym, it helps us heal in times of heartbreak or grief. It brings people together, it accompanies us in solitude.
No one understands the importance of music more than Dr. Raymond Goldsworthy, head of the Bionic Ear Lab in the USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. Dr. Goldsworthy lost his hearing at the age of thirteen, just as he was beginning to learn the drums. Like every teenager, he was just beginning his journey into the seemingly limitless world of music, when a bout with spinal meningitis and the ensuing treatment damaged his hearing.
"There is never a good time to lose your hearing, but what was particularly challenging for me at that age was that my friends were discovering new music," Dr. Goldsworthy remembers. "It hurt that I could not turn to music for comfort during that time."
He received a cochlear implant, then a relatively new technology that has since become a life-changing device for hundreds of thousands of hard-of-hearing people. Cochlear implants are sound processors that sit behind the ear, catching sound and transmitting it via electrodes that stimulate the auditory nerve. The result is an approximation of hearing that, while perhaps less precise than an average person's, can help restore a remarkable degree of ability when hearing loss has progressed to the point that a hearing aid is no longer useful.
And, as Dr. Goldsworthy and his researchers at the Bionic Ear Lab have shown, technology can always be improved.
As a music enthusiast and a musician, Dr. Goldsworthy and his team have spent years researching ways to improve the experience of music for cochlear implant users. Their most recent paper (available here), which was co-authored by graduate student Andres Camarena and medical student Grace Manchala, set out to examine exactly how cochlear implant users perceive harmonies.
