This is part of a series I have been thinking about for a long time. When I have a fleeting thought about some neat idea, I should publish it to ensure that it can not be patented later.

I saw an ad for hearing aids, and that made me wonder if instead of simply amplifying, hearing aids could do some more sophisticated sound transforms. Maybe they do already.

Since hearing loss is typically non-uniform across the hearing spectrum, it would make sense to transpose sounds from “bad” ranges to “good” ranges. Of course, in practice, that might sound weird. For example, someone with high-frequency hearing loss might have high-pitched consonant sounds transposed to a lower end of the spectrum. I’m sure the listener would have to adjust to that, since we’re used to vowels sounding low and consonants sounding high.