Fortunately, I have no hearing issues that I’m aware of, but I am an engineer and engineers think about solutions. So, being relatively ignorant in this domain, here is my vision.

Imagine a hearing aid that doesn’t just amplify sound in a gross sense, but dynamically sculpts it; section by section of the spectrum so that every nuance of your favorite track or live performance emerges in perfect clarity. By combining user-driven EQ feedback with adaptive optimization algorithms (on a smart phone interface for example) musicians could train their hearing aids in minutes to addres their highly personal hearing deficit and sonic preferences. This could be done song by song or genre by genre, or studio monitor vs headphones, or live concert setting, or combinations of the above, etc. Near-zero latency DSP on the device might be required, but hardware advances are happening all the time.

Much like we have 20-20kHz EQ capabilities in our DAWs to sculpt tracks in our mix to our liking, so too we’d be able to sculpt what we hear on-demand as the various situations in our sonic environments require. Think, any effects plugin available in your DAW would be available onboard in this “hearing aid” system.

As a practical matter I could see such a system generating 5 or so candidate multi-band EQ curves that the user would judge or rank as to how pleasing they are for a particular piece of music. If the most pleasing of these curves is good enough it’s done. If not, a second or third pass would further refine it to what it is you want.

Then as a refinement to this you’d just say “boost the hi-hat” or “enhance the female vocals” and it (possibly via AI) would know exactly where and how to adjust.

I’m assuming that such a system does not yet exist and that today’s hearing aid technology is limited to hard presets for quiet conversation, conversations filled with background noise, TV watching, driving a car, all-purpose, etc.

Just an idea . . .

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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.