One of our most treasured friends and collaborators who also happens to be deaf is the ridiculously incredibly talented singer and songwriter mandy harvey mandy's origin story is a not impossible story in itself and you can go on our website and see that in its entirety but i want you for a minute to imagine that music is your life and then in a cruel twist your sense of hearing fades and eventually goes away completely you have to leave the university music program that you've worked your whole life to make it into and your dream of a career in music seems to disappear the story of mandy's journey from that moment defines the not impossible spirit hey mandy how are you hey i'm doing good it's lovely to see you and it's so amazing now there's the feature on zoom that you can actually see the closed captions so i actually know what's going on in this conversation so listen everyone obviously who knows you and meets you or hears about your story is just baffled and dumbfounded and they do what i do which is and i've known you for a while just wait a second how how does this work how does this happen so can you explain the the act of what you went through to actually once you lost your hearing how you got to be able to continue to sing with your beautiful voice initially the biggest barrier of all of it was being willing to try and to push myself because the whole world told me that it would be impossible for me to be able to do music again and i believed it and so i just kind of left it at that but my dad asked me to play guitar with him and so i picked up a guitar and we were just strumming chords together and i noticed for the first time that i could feel the vibrations of the instrument through my fingertips and as i'm holding this instrument it's rumbling on my skin and i'm like wait a minute everyone feels music first that's the way sound works so how can i feel my way into understanding how to perform again and it started this whole journey through feeling my voice instead of relying on listening to it incredible i actually grabbed a visual tuner i want to show you one but basically what i use this for is i would pick a note and then watch it align and make sure that my note is actually in the green that should be a c i can't see it from this angle but i'm sure you can see it and then from there i would actually place my hand on my throat to try to isolate where that vibration is the strongest so if you bear with me for just a second gently place your hand on your throat and we're just gonna make a note now feel where the vibration is the strongest and try to pinpoint it with your with your pointer finger for me it's here it's actually lower now as you're holding on you're going to jump to a different note something really high oh so gorgeous you look good but do you feel that the vibration shifted yeah it completely moved so i would sit in front of the mirror and i'd grab a marker initially sharpies because i didn't think this through who knows and for me the vibration is the strongest here so i'd make a line and then i'd put a c right on my skin and then i went and did my scales so while watching myself do and then go along and find different notes and then feel where they are the strongest and then i would look at myself in a mirror with these markings like a crazy person and i would say to myself okay i found them once now let's find them again and so doing this again and again and again i actually built up trust because your voice is a muscle and if you can train your muscle to do something it will continue to do it so if you because you can see in the captioning you can when i say something you can see it so if you can put me through the ringer and i don't yeah yeah put your phone up to the camera either to the the computer or the gopro whatever whatever you want and then you sing it and then just show the camera [Music] oh am i still at sea i hope so i'm a little flat that's okay okay that was a ridiculous that was so amazing and then with my songs i actually put little secret notes to myself to remind myself that i'm right and if it's okay i'd like to play part of a song for you and to show you where i hid them oh yeah please by the way i'm still just like shaking my head watching this this is this is amazing it's it's a fun time i'm gonna i'm gonna go with a song that i wrote called try and i i put it in this key because the core goes back into that c and i love finding c okay so the first notes that we're going to play is actually the chord of g which is a b so i'm just going up one little nugget from c c is my safe space so i want to be as close to c as possible so that's why i chose this first note i don't feel the way i used to [Music] the sky is gray much more than it is and i'll take my place again if i would try [Music] so the try the try is the most important part it's the most important part so this is why because that note it's annoying and it bothers right underneath my eye and so every time it happens it buzzes so as you go along if you sit in front of a mirror with your own visual tuner and your own set of markers you're going to do scales and some notes really rumble in your chest but then some of the high ones you can feel them behind your nose and this one gets me right behind this eye and it bothers me so i was like if i'm gonna sing a song that is about as true to me and about the most painful part of my life i'm gonna have something that i can physically feel some element of pain so that's why that's there try it's annoying every time [Music] that's just it is so amazing mandy and i love that you actually have the presence or the you just are so self-aware of where oh it doesn't vibrate in this eye vibrates in this eye and it vibrates here every time now i will say this the only time that it does move like from here and it'll like sink is if i'm like congested or sick so i do this exercise every day so it's like it's something that i do like when i'm getting ready to sing like i have to center myself i find middle c and then i do my scales and i i do this religiously and i have certain things that i do that are exactly the same every time and that might be annoying for some people but for me it's that consistency that allows me the freedom to trust myself so you know start small and branch from there all right what was the was there one note that was harder when you were learning than the others um yeah i mean anytime you're like far away like those like in between guys because i practice c so much that i have to like really be conscious about the scale but what i like to do instead of like popcorning it because that makes me more nervous and when i get nervous i doubt myself and so what i rather like to do is do songs that string together so that the ending note is the either like a very short distance away from the starting note of the next song and then i actually like very quickly sing through the song in my mind and then go to that note so that's that's more it's more tricky if you're doing that popcorn business because then you get like i don't want to be wrong on camera you know like you get scared you i hope you know how much we and none of possible love you and how we were inspired by you and then when the world found out about you and was inspired by you we were like that's right that's right see she's amazing so just thank you for being you and thank you for playing with us today and i know that people are going to be just so amazed by by learning more and seeing what you actually do to become the beautiful well in the bottom of my heart thank you for doing what you guys are doing it's incredible and for everybody who's at home watching this i really would love for people to understand that just because something seems impossible it's maybe probable that it's just impossible today like and we can fix it and then make something better because i think anything can feel impossible if it's never been done before and then once we do it more and more then it just becomes normal i mean how many amazing blind pianists do we have in the world but then you had somebody big like stevie wonder or ray charles and now it's just like yeah blind people play the piano all the time we need more people to be adventurous and to put through themselves through the paces so that it's not scary anymore you're amazing thank you mandy we love you thank you so much of course