An exemplary system comprises a first and second hearing device associated with a first and second ear of a user, respectively. The first hearing device is configured to detect a first audio signal representative of audio content, generate a first intermediate signal representation (ISR) corresponding to the first audio signal, the first ISR comprising a sparsely-encoded non-audio signal having a complexity measure that is below a threshold, and transmit the first ISR to the second hearing device. The second hearing device is configured to detect a second audio signal representative of the audio content, generate a second ISR corresponding to the second audio signal, and transmit the second ISR to the first hearing device. The first hearing device is further configured to generate, based on the first and second ISRs, an output audio signal, and provide the output audio signal to the first ear of the user.