Sona

The Inspiration

Our team's journey began with a shared personal challenge: All of our members have a mutual understanding of sensory overload, that overwhelming wall of sound that makes public spaces suffocating.

Noise canceling headphones have become a common solution for many neurodivergent people, a way to create their own safe space in a world hat often feels far too loud. However, for some users they come with a painful trade off. As one mother of two children with sensory processing issues put it:

"In noisy places, autism headphones can be a lifesaver... While these headphones are excellent for reducing stress from overwhelming sounds, they can also block out voices, important instruction, and even potential dangers."

• Rachel Anders

We kept reading the experiences of other people who face this issue and it appeared everywhere. Loud stimuli are genuinely overwhelming for people with sensory sensitivity issues. But silence isn't safety either. A child who can't hear their parent call their name in a crowd. A teenager who misses a teacher's instruction. An adult who can't have a conversation with someone they trust without removing their headphones and bracing themselves against their world.

What We Built

SoundSafe is a Python based audio processing system that gives neurodivergent users control over their audio environment. It blocks ambient noise with an adjustable cancellation level while also having the ability to isolate voices so that they can come through clearly. It can convert isolated voices into a calmer, more soothing tone for users who are already feeling overwhelmed.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

One accomplishment we're proud of is successfully integrating ElevenLabs' API to achieve real time voice isolation and conversion. It was a technical milestone getting it to work smoothly. Equally as meaningful was the chance to build something that addresses a real problem for an underrepresented community.

What We learned

The most valuable thing we learned didn't come from building, it came from a DojoDesk workshop prompt that told us to look for problems closer than we think. We stopped to think about mutual issues that we had that also affected a larger scale of people.

Crowded places. Busy streets. Loud spaces. Auditory sensory overload, at times they can feel suffocating but for people with sensory issues, it's physically taxing. As we looked deeper and sought out different perspectives, we kept landing on the same issue. That noise-canceling headphones help regulate sensory overload, but they also create a wall between the wearer and the people they care about. A parent calling your name. A friend trying to get your attention. A moment that passes because the signal never got through. What struck us was that this wasn't a new problem it was just an unaddressed one. The tools and need existed but nobody had meaningfully addressed the issue. Sometimes the people closest to an experience have simply learned to live with it. That was its own kind of learning.

What's Next for SoundSafe

Having the software gives us the opportunity to connect it directly to existing hardware, headphones that people already rely on. Just like that, the solution can live exactly where the problem does. Just a layer of intelligence built into something that’s already there.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• python