The ICASSP SP Cadenza Challenge: Music Demixing/Remixing for Hearing Aids
This addresses the challenge of improving music listening experiences for individuals with hearing loss, representing an incremental advancement in audio processing for assistive devices.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing music audio quality for hearing aid users by demixing and remixing pop/rock music into vocal, drums, bass, and other tracks, with 9 out of 17 submitted systems outperforming the baseline.
This paper reports on the design and results of the 2024 ICASSP SP Cadenza Challenge: Music Demixing/Remixing for Hearing Aids. The Cadenza project is working to enhance the audio quality of music for those with a hearing loss. The scenario for the challenge was listening to stereo reproduction over loudspeakers via hearing aids. The task was to: decompose pop/rock music into vocal, drums, bass and other (VDBO); rebalance the different tracks with specified gains and then remixing back to stereo. End-to-end approaches were also accepted. 17 systems were submitted by 11 teams. Causal systems performed poorer than non-causal approaches. 9 systems beat the baseline. A common approach was to fine-tuning pretrained demixing models. The best approach used an ensemble of models.