[CfP] The Second Cadenza Challenge to Improve Music for Those with Hearing Loss

[Jon P Barker]

The Second Cadenza Signal Processing Challenge to Improve Music for Those with Hearing Loss

Open now

Submission deadline: January 2025

The 2nd Cadenza Challenge (CAD2) is part of the IEEE SPS Challenge Program. The SPS are funding cash prizes for the best entrants.

Why are these challenges important?

According to The World Health Organization, 430 million people worldwide have a disabling hearing loss. Hearing loss causes various problems such as quieter music passages being inaudible, poor and anomalous pitch perception, difficulties identifying and picking out instruments, and problems hearing out lyrics. While hearing aids have music programmes, the effectiveness of these is mixed. 

2nd Cadenza Challenge (CAD2)

There are two tasks

1. Improving the intelligibility of lyrics for pop/rock music while not harming audio quality.
2. Rebalancing the level of instruments within a classical music ensemble (e.g. string quartet) to allow personalised mixes.

For both tasks, a ML-based demix / remix approach could be used. Gains could be applied to the demixed signals before remixing back to stereo to achieve the aims of the challenge. For lyric intelligibility, a simple amplification of the vocals could increase intelligibility, but there are other ways to achieve this that might cause less harm to audio quality. It would also be possible to use other machine learning approaches such as end-to-end transformation.

We provide music signals, software tools, objective metrics and baselines. The two tasks are evaluated using objective metrics. For lyric intelligibility, there will also be perceptual tests
with listeners who have hearing loss.

More details: http://cadenzachallenge.org/

To stay up to date please sign up for the Cadenza Challenge's Google group

https://groups.google.com/g/cadenza-challenge

Please feel free to circulate this invitation to colleagues who you think may be interested.