Westfield’s Matt Hay is a man who wears many hats.
He is the Director of Audiology Sales for Redux, a company specializing in moisture removal from personal electronics; a researcher; an NPR podcaster; a man who works in fundraising, lobbying for people with hearing loss; and a finalist for the 2020 Oticon Focus on People Awards.
Hay
Hay would also be completely deaf if not for an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) he has lived with for 16 years.
The Reporter was fortunate enough to talk with Hay about his journey, how he has adapted to the ABI technology, how his love of music led him to compose a soundtrack for his life, and how his story may soon become a Channing Tatum movie.
ABI Technology
“I only half-joke when I say there’s never been a better time in history to be deaf because the technology that is available right now to help people with hearing loss is pretty remarkable,” Hay told The Reporter.
“I am completely deaf,” he said. “I have bilateral tumors on my hearing nerves called acoustic neuromas, so hearing aids won’t help because the nerve is the last step in the hearing process. A hearing aid would be like repainting the lines on the highways with the bridge still out at the end of the road.”
Hay has an auditory brainstem implant that allows him a version of hearing that is quite different than you may imagine.
“I have electrodes surgically implanted onto my brain stem,” he said. “All of my hearing is completely artificial. That in itself is pretty remarkable technology. I joke that my ears don’t do anything except keep my sunglasses from falling off my face.”
Socially and professionally, Hay uses Zoom a great deal.
“On this call right now, I have Zoom up on one screen and next to that I open up a second box on Google and I use what’s called Otter.ai, a voice-recognition software app,” he said. “Everything you say or I say shows up on my screen with probably 90 percent accuracy.”
A visual guide to hearing loss
Hay told The Reporter he is a visual thinker. He said he believes that has served him well in overcoming hearing loss and adapting to the technology that has partially restored his sense of sound.
“If you don’t have hearing loss you don’t really get what it’s like,” he said. “People will politely speak up, but my problem isn’t necessarily volume, it’s speech understanding, which is very common for people with hearing loss.”
He shared a visual metaphor for how he perceives the world of sound, which this writer hopes will help our readers better understand how to communicate more effectively with people who live with various forms of hearing loss.
“Imagine being at a dinner table in a crowded restaurant and there are 10 people at a dining table,” Hay explained. “For me, I can only hear whoever has the ‘spotlight’ on them. I imagine the whole room is dark, but there it a spotlight on whoever is speaking because that is the only way I can hear that person. If somebody taps my shoulder, in the moment that I look away from that person, my world is dark because I don’t hear anything until I make eye contact with another person, and now that person has the spotlight.”
According to Hay, the spotlight can never shine on two people at the same time.
“If I drop a fork, I have to make the mental decision, ‘Is it worth losing the spotlight? Is it worth my communication world going dark for a moment to bend down and pick my fork up, knowing that when I look back up I am going to have to figure out who has the spotlight again and then figure out the context of that spotlight?’” he said.
That is one of the reasons Hay prefers one-on-one conversations to groups even as small as three.
“In groups of three the spotlight very quickly bounces back from one person to another,” he explained. “So I have to choose if I am going to be the spotlight – am I going to be the one who dominates the conversation, or am I going to be doing this tennis match of going from spotlight to spotlight watching the world bounce back and forth? That’s how I explain poor hearing to people who don’t grasp the concept.”
Going deaf
Hay lost hearing in one ear in during his sophomore year of college in 1996. At the end of the semester he went to an audiologist. Because the test results were so irregular, he was given an MRI and diagnosed with bilateral brain tumors.
“I spent the next 10 years with my health declining because of the tumors and my hearing loss getting worse before I had surgery to remove the larger tumor and have the ABI put in,” he said. “That was done in 2004. I have been listening purely with my ABI for 16 years now.”
When he had the ABI procedure, he was told the implantation was as much art as science. The doctors told him he would probably only hear “life sounds” like oven timers, fire alarms and ambulances sirens.
“I thought even that would be really helpful,” he said. “And at first that really is all that I heard.”
Hay explained that in early conversation with his wife after the implant, his hearing was so poor that she would say “no” as “no-no” because he could not hear the difference between “yes” and “no.” He described it as sounding like a growl. Thus, “yes” was perceived as a single sound and “no-no” as two sounds.
Sixteen years of daily practice later, he has adapted to the technology in ways even he finds remarkable.
Composing his personal soundtrack
When he knew his hearing loss would eventually become both complete and permanent, he and his wife started to prepare for that by taking sign language classes and building a better memory of music he loved.
“One thing I started inadvertently doing was listening to the songs that were really meaningful in my life over and over again,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m never going to hear another song again, so what songs do I want stuck in my head for the next 60 years?’ There was never a moment where I sat down and thought that thoroughly about it, but it was more, ‘Oh, Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys is on.’ I’ve always loved that song. There is something unique about it. When that song was on, I would really stop and listen to it. So, I started seeking out that kind of music.”
Hay said he has great memories of listening to Prince when he first got his driver’s license.
“Driving with friends when you’re 16 and you have freedom for the first time … You roll the windows down in the car and drive down the highway and blast music. For my friends and I that was Prince – listening to Purple Rain or Seven. Those were songs I wanted to hear.”
Hay had listened to a great deal of The Beatles in college. In a time when he had no health concerns, he said his life was very easy and challenge-free. He told The Reporter he was “inadvertently creating a soundtrack for a life that had not yet happened.”
“I am fortunate that I never found solace in sad songs,” Hay said. “Most of my music memories are very positive. My mom liked Bridge Over Troubled Water so I was listening to a lot of Simon & Garfunkel. Dad liked Bob Dylan. So I sought those out.”
When he recovered a new version of his hearing, having studied those songs as some of the last things he had listened to, music became part of his rehabilitation.
“When I began to hear again my wife and I were driving down the street,” Hay told The Reporter. “She had a CD in her car. I said, ‘Is this That Was a Crazy Game of Poker by O.A.R.? It was just a random small band that we listened to when we first got married. There was just one particular hook in that song and the beat – in a moment of clarity I thought, ‘I know this song!’ It was the first time I had heard a song of any kind in four years. We pulled over and cried. It was a moment we didn’t know was ever going to happen.”
That is when music became Hay’s rehab.
“I decided to go back and revisit those songs,” he said. “For a year none of them sounded like anything, but like with any practice, slowly but surely I started identifying certain songs.”
He gave an example of a chord and beat from Let It Be.
“My brain, just from muscle-memory, said, ‘That’s Let It Be,’” he said. “Then I could start picking up the rest of the song. Once I would get the song, I would add it to a playlist. I now have a playlist on my phone of 63 songs I have recovered that my brain can listen to without context and know. If somebody puts on music by The Beatles, it will take me a few seconds, but I can usually pick up what song it is. It is still nothing like regular hearing. Things now sound very muffled and robotic. It sounds mechanical. But when that’s how you hear for 16 years, that just becomes your hearing. There are days that I forget I am deaf. I forget that I don’t hear ‘normal,’ I’m just so grateful to be able to hear at all.”
On the way to the silver screen
Hay was at the Kentucky Derby when he met a friend of a friend who happened to be the daughter of Mike Love, one of the founders of the Beach Boys.
“I shared with her that in my hearing loss experience Good Vibrations was one of the songs that I committed to as something that I would want to hear for the rest of my life, ‘and your dad wrote it!’” Hay told The Reporter, “I never imagined that I could share that story and it would get back to the guy who wrote the song.”
April Dembosky from NPR overheard that conversation and offered Hay an opportunity to tell his story to her listeners. He says Dembosky did a good job of making him sound more interesting than he is.
But this writer suspects she did no such thing. Hay is quite interesting to talk with.
The idea of creating a soundtrack for a life you haven’t yet lived resonated with an agent who heard the podcast and thought it is a story worthy of film.
“Eventually it got in front of Channing Tatum who said, ‘I feel like this is a movie I was intended to make,’” Hay told The Reporter. “It all happened very quickly. Channing met personally with the president of Paramount and the president of Paramount said, ‘We’re in. Let’s make this happen.’ Then the attorneys got involved and it took about year.”
Today, Hay has a contract with Paramount Pictures, with Channing Tatum, and with Temple Hill Productions, the production company behind the Twilight series.
“They own the rights to the story,” Hay said. “Even without a worldwide pandemic, moviemaking can be very unpredictable. So we try to manage our expectations. It is still a long shot that the movie actually gets made. But it was a much longer shot two years ago when we didn’t have an actor and a production studio and a write all under contract. But until a movie gets made there is no guarantee a movie gets made.”
Learn more
To vote for Matt Hay in the Oticon People’s Choice Awards, click this link. Please note that the form will require you to vote for all four categories. Hay is featured in the adult category and bios for all finalists are available on the Oticon website. Voting ends Monday, Nov. 16.
To hear the original “Soundtrack of Silence” NPR podcast with April Dembosky’s interview of Matt Hay, click this link.
To read the issue of “Hearing Life” where Hay was featured in the cover story, click this link.