Soundtrack of Silence

An inspiring memoir of a young man who discovered he was going completely deaf just at the moment he’d fallen in love for the first time.

As a child, Matt Hay didn’t know his hearing wasn’t the way everyone else processed sound-because of the workarounds he did to ?t in, even the school nurse didn’t catch his condition at the annual hearing and vision checks. But by the time he was a prospective college student and couldn’t pass the entrance requirements for West Point, Hay’s condition, generated by a tumor, was unavoidable: his hearing was going, and fast.

A personal soundtrack was Hay’s determined compensation for his condition. As a typical Midwestern kid growing up in the 1980s whose life events were pegged to pop music, Hay planned to commit his favorite songs to memory. He prepared a mental playlist of the bands he loved and created a way to tap into his most resonant memories. And the track he needed to cement most clearly? The one he and his new girlfriend, Nora-the love of his life-listened to in the car on their ?rst date.

Made vivid with references to instantly recognizable songs-from the Eagles to Elton John, Bob Marley to Bing Crosby, U2 to Peter Frampton-Soundtrack of Silence asks readers to run the soundtrack of their own lives through their minds. It’s an involving memoir of loss and disability, and, ultimately, a both unique and universal love story.

Author Biography

Matt Hay was born and raised in Indiana. He holds a BS and MBA from the Indiana University School of Business. Throughout Matt’s journey of hearing loss and recovery he held a full-time roll in media sales, but his heart remained in non-profit work within the hard of hearing community. Matt has served on the national Board of Directors for the Children’s Tumor Foundation, is a Certified Cochlear Corp Advocate, a development adviser for the St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf and public speaker at various hearing loss related events. Somewhere in there he did an Ironman Triathlon. He now serves as the U.S. Director of Advocacy for Neurofibromatosis at Alexion Pharmaceuticals. He currently lives in Westfield, IN with his wife/hero of 17 years and three teenage children and spends each day trying to focus on the things he can do, not the things he cannot.