Cadenza Project for Music and Hearing Loss: New Signal Processing Challenge Launched
The 2nd Cadenza Challenge (CAD2) has launched, focussing on improving experiences of music for people with a hearing loss.
The 2nd Cadenza Challenge (CAD2) has launched, focussing on improving experiences of music for people with a hearing loss.
CAD2 is part of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Challenge Program. The challenge involves two tasks:
- Improve the intelligibility of lyrics in pop/rock music without harming audio quality
- Rebalance the level of instruments in a classical music ensemble (e.g., string quartet) to allow for personalised mixes
For the 1st task, a panel of hearing aid users will subjectively rate the systems in terms of lyrics intelligibility and audio quality. Dr Scott Bannister and Professor Alinka Greasley lead on developing these ratings at the University of Leeds School of Music, building on their recent research on music audio quality and hearing loss in rontiersF in Psychology, openly accessible here.
The CAD2 challenge is now open to any entrants:
To help make participation easier, the challenge provides musical materials, software tools, baseline systems, and objective metrics for training and evaluating systems.
Prof. Greasley emphasised: “We are really pleased with how the Cadenza project is going so far. We have a better understanding of what people with hearing loss want from music, and the key attributes influencing their perception of sound quality. We are now focusing on tackling two areas of musical experience that are particularly challenging for hearing aid users, that of hearing out lyrics, and the balance of different instruments in a mix.”
This challenge forms part of the Cadenza Project, aiming to improve the experiences of music for those with hearing loss. This is a wider cross-university initiative led by the University of Salford, in collaboration with the University of Leeds, University of Sheffield, and University of Nottingham.
The Cadenza Project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
FOR MORE INFO & TO TAKE PART: https://cadenzachallenge.org/docs/cadenza2/intro
