Can you hear what I see? How can the silence be so loud?

Our 5 senses of taste, smell, touch, sound, and sight help us to interact and better understand the world around us.  Integrating the feedback from these senses is vital to our survival.  Scientist have found that some individuals can integrate their senses in a way that if one is taken away our brain can make up the deficit in a way that has not been previously explored.
        In The New York Times, an article titled Why we "Hear" some silent GIFs,  reports on   individuals who have auditory responses to soundless visual aids.  A researcher from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology of the University of Glasgow made a social media post of a GIF, motion images without sound, and asked if any one could hear it.  Nearly 70 percent of the individuals who responded stated they could hear sound from the silent GIF.  Cognitive neuroscientists Elliot Freeman and Chris Fassnidge of the University of London call this visual-evoked-auditory-response or visual EAR.  Visual EAR is not just for images where you are expecting to hear a sound.  It is prevalent with flashes of light, range of motions, and abstract patterns as well.  One study shows 20 percent of individuals can hear sound during images of flashing light in silent videos.
The researchers at the California Institute of Technology categorize this phenomenon as a type of auditory synesthesia.  Individuals with synetheisia are known to perceive the world differently in which they have an automatic sensory cross activation.  For instance they might see letters or numbers as having colors.  For auditory synetheisia they perceive flashes of light or movements as having sound.  In one experiment they found 4 synesthetes that out performed nonsynesthetes in an experiment involving rhythmic flashes of light.  The subjects were shown 2 sets of  rhythmic flashes of lights.  This was done in 2 trials, one with sound the other without sound.  They were asked to determine if the second pattern of light had the same rhythm as the first.  Both groups performed equally as well with the trial that included sound.  However, with the trial that just had the flashes the synesthetes were accurate 75 percent of the time compared to 50 percent for the nonsynsthete control group.  It seems synesthetes have an advantage because they can "hear" visual patterns.
In recent studies using electrical brain stimulation they discovered signs that auditory and visual brain areas cooperate more in individuals with visual EAR and tend to compete more in non visual EAR individuals.  For them the sound of a flash of light can be powerful enough to drown out real world sounds.   In a talk presented by Dr. Dye at Loyola University Chicago, on Precedence and Recency Effects in Binaural Hearing were he discussed differentiation between sounds based on pitch or frequency.  In the study they wanted to examine the time interval between the source and the echo and which time interval  a lower frequency would be dominant.  As more research is done on the visual EAR individuals I would like to know if they differentiate sound differently than non visual EAR individuals.  Also If we added a visually loud stimulus to the echo or the source would the result be different compared to non visual EAR individuals?   Do visual EAR individuals have an advantage in auditory differentiation because they can better associate it with visual images?

Can you hear this?

           Dye , Raymond H, et al. “Lateralization of Simulated Sources and Echoes Differing in Frequency Based on Interaural Temporal Differences.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 22 Dec. 2016, 
Murphy, Heather. “Why We Hear Silent GIFs.” The New York Times, 8 Dec. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/why-we-hear-some-silent-gifs.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Ftrilobites, http://www.website.com
http://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-neurobiologists-discover-individuals-who-hear-movement-1455