ICASSP 2026 SP Grand Challenge: Lyric Intelligibility Prediction

[Trevor Cox]

The Cadenza project is working to improve music for those with hearing loss. Hearing loss is a growing global problem due to the aging population and increased exposure to loud sound. Hearing loss causes problems when listening to music including making picking out lyrics more difficult.

In speech technology, having metrics to automatically evaluate intelligibility has driven improvements in speech enhancement. We want to do the same for music. There has been little research into Lyric Intelligibility Prediction, so there is lots of scope to learn from Speech, Scene Understanding and MIR to do novel research.

The top 5 ranked teams will be invited to submit papers to ICASSP-2026, Barcelona, Spain.

We will challenge entrants to develop systems that predict lyric intelligibility from song excerpts of popular Western music. The systems will take stereo audio as input and estimate the word correct rate a listener is likely to achieve in a perceptual test.

Challenge is live at https://cadenzachallenge.org/ submission deadline 1st December 2025.