Development of the 2nd Cadenza challenge for improving music listening for people with a hearing loss

Abstract

The Cadenza project is an ongoing project that aims to improve music quality for those with a hearing loss. The project is running signal-processing and machine-learning challenges to address different listening issues and scenarios. During the first round, the challenge focused on non-causal music source separation to allow remixing for those with hearing loss. This fed into an ICASSP 2024 challenge, which had crosstalk from loudspeaker reproduction included. There are three potential arms to our upcoming 2024 challenge based on reported issues from hearing-impaired music listeners: (1) low-latency causal audio source separation, (2) lyric intelligibility enhancement without loss of timbre or instrumental balance, and (3) loudness/dynamic range control. Each of these potential challenges raise questions as to the appropriate reference signals, as well as the practicalities of deriving the appropriate signals for an open-source machine-learning challenge. [Work supported by UK EPSRC Grant No. EP/W019434/1]