Ali was born with “profound hearing loss,” which her musician father realized when he hit one of his drums very hard with a toddler-aged Ali nearby, and his daughter didn’t even flinch. “It was devastating,” Ali’s mother, sitting with Ali’s dad and speaking with Voice host Carson Daly, recalled. “All these things go through your head like, ‘What about music?’”
It turns out that Ali’s mom and dad needn’t have worried. “My parents, they never really looked at it like I was ‘broken,’” Ali explained. “We worked around it. We worked with it. Music is something that I love so much. As much as I doubt myself, I’m going to do it. Even though I can’t really hear every single thing that’s going on, I can feel the music — what it means and what the lyrics are about — and I can also feel the beat. I can feel every little thing coming out of the speaker, and that’s how I’m able to do the things that I do. That’s my superpower.”
Ali admitted that “it took a long time for me to have this kind of courage to do something as big as this, but she seemed supremely confident on the Voice stage, and much like Season 16 winner Maelyn Jarmon — who also once described her own partial deafness as her “superpower” — she had a beautiful, raspy-but-rounded tone and shockingly perfect pitch. After her lovely cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” she told the coaches, “Fun fact about me is I am hearing-impaired. I wear two hearing aids. I was born deaf. I’m so blessed to be able to share this.” And they were understandably astounded.
Source: Yahoo! entertainment