This Is What You Don’t See

This series explores how everyday sounds can become overwhelming and even painful for people with sound sensitivity, especially those on the autism spectrum. While most people can block out background noise or adjust to loud environments, for someone with sensory processing challenges, a common sound—like a ticking clock, or a chaotic laughter—can feel like a sudden collapse of the world around them. The goal of this project is to give a visual form to that invisible experience. Each image is based on a specific real-world sound that has been documented in scientific research to cause distress in people with sound sensitivity. We used those research papers to build prompts that describe what a person might internally feel when exposed to each sound. These prompts were then passed through an open-source AI image generation tool using a fully custom-coded, programmatic pipeline. The images are not meant to show what the sound looks like, but what the person feels inside when they hear it—disorientation, collapse, overstimulation, fragmentation. For example, the sound of a jackhammer is visualized as cracks splitting open the earth, and a fire alarm/siren becomes a vortex of red chaos. This project is also part of a larger research initiative where we study how AI art can help visualize hidden struggles and raise awareness in a deeper way. By translating internal emotional reactions into visual language, we hope these works can foster empathy, understanding, conversations and awareness about internal sensory struggles that often go unnoticed. Each artwork was generated with careful prompt crafting and tested through multiple iterations to make sure it stayed true to both the scientific insight and the emotional weight of the subject. The result is a series that invites viewers to look beyond the surface and feel what isn’t always seen. These are the Photo numbers (sequence order) and the sound they denote: Photo 1: Fireworks Photo 2: Gunshot Photo 3: Screaming Photo 4: Train Screeching Photo 5: Siren Photo 6: Jackhammer Photo 7: Chaotic Laughter Photo 8: Clock Ticking