Dear colleague, It gives us great pleasure to pre-announce the next Cadenza Challenge for music processing and hearing difference. This autumn we will be running the Cadenza Lyric Intelligibility Prediction Challenge (CLIP). We're hoping this will be accepted as an ICASSP 2026 Grand Challenge.

The Challenge​

To develop better music processing through machine learning, we need reliable way to automatically evaluate the audio. For music with lyrics, then we need a metric to evaluate the intelligibility of the sung words. The metric would come from a predictive model that takes as input audio and estimates the lyric intelligibility score that someone would achieve in a listening test.

With the development of large language models and foundation models for speech and music, there is great potential to significantly improve the current state-of-the-art. The music will be genres like pop and rock. Some of this will be as-is, other will be passed through a hearing loss simulator to mimic listeners with hearing loss but not wearing hearing aids.

We have two major updates from the Cadenza project.

First, we completed the sensory panel study in which our participants with hearing loss developed audio quality scales for use in our listening experiments. We presented our study findings at the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) in Tokyo, Japan in August and at the Basic Auditory Science (BAS) conference in London in September.

We are now reaching the end of our sensory evaluation study, where a panel of twelve listeners who use hearing aids have worked across online music listening tasks and three focus groups, to reach a consensus on the important perceptual attributes of music audio quality.

Here at Cadenza our sensory evaluation work to define audio quality for hearing impaired listeners is underway. We want to understand better how hearing-impaired listeners perceive audio quality in music and develop quality metrics that will subsequently be used by our listener panel to rate the systems submitted by challenge entrants. Through careful listening tasks and group discussion, the sensory panel will arrive at a consensus about important sound quality attributes and how these should be measured. You can find out more about this process on the Sensory Evaluation page.

Welcome to the new Cadenza webpage. We will be using this page to post the latest news about our forthcoming machine learning challenges and workshops, as well as posts discussing the tools and techniques that we are using in our baseline systems.