Same here, particularly during a time when I was living in a noisy apartment building. It was particularly difficult for me as I didn't to take sleeping pills since I'm a bit against those things.
>Whoever cracks this particular nut without headphones and manages to create a bubble of 2 cubic meters or so that is silent from outside interference will make a lot of money.
One of the first things when I got myself an RTX 2080, was learning how to use the ray tracing APIs to develop an idea similar to what you mention. I was using the rays to model the wavefront of an arbitrary source of sound, and then, given a 3D scene of a "room" or whatever, visualize how this wave was traveling through the space and reflecting over surfaces with different parameters.
The point of this was to see if you could find/predict the spots in a room/house/building where noise is naturally damped. The visualization was very nice to look at as I modeled the wavefront as if it had an exaggerated effect over the diffraction of light on the air. I cannot find it now, but there used to be a 2000s or so tv ad for the Beolab 5 which looked very similar in essence, maybe also a bit like schlieren photography [1].
[1] https://ntts-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/t2p/prod/t2media/tops/img...