The Sound of Silence: What It Feels Like to Lose Hearing by The Paper

How does it feel to not hear? According to Xu Kaifeng, a person with near-total deafness, living in a world without sound feels like you don't exist at all. For those with healthy ears, it's hard to imagine what it's like to have trouble hearing things. Taking sounds for granted, they may easily lose their understanding and empathy for people with hearing loss.
To bridge this gap, we interviewed experts and conducted hearing tests on individuals with hearing loss. Drawing on visualization techniques commonly used in the field of audiology, we simulated the aural world of those with hearing issues and displayed their everyday life to our readers.
Starting from the story of Xu Kaifeng, we delved into the causes of hearing losses, the methods to partially restore hearing, and the social and cultural misunderstandings faced by people with hearing problems, and finally created an interactive product featured with multimedia approaches including text, data, graphics, audio and videos.