4 posts tagged with "cadenza"

Cadenza and Manchester Camerata Research Concert​

When it comes to live concerts, people with hearing loss often talk of a poorer experience. We’ve listened... so we’re putting on a concert of our own!

The Cadenza project team are putting on a free concert in conjunction with Manchester Camerata at Stoller Hall, Manchester on 29th October 2026.

The concert will mix romantic classical music alongside a research activity wherein you’ll hear the orchestra perform excerpts in novel ways, based on problems reported by people with hearing loss, to see how they affect your listening experiences. The focus will be on the experience of hearing aid users, but all are welcome! There will also be a Q&A session at the end of the concert with experts on hearing loss, hearing aids and music.

To receive updates on this event, please sign up to the Hearing Aids for Music mailing list: http://eepurl.com/h0QXbr

People with hearing loss can have difficulties to clearly and effortlessly hearing lyrics. In speech technology, having metrics to automatically evaluate intelligibility has driven improvements in speech enhancement through machine learning. We want to do the same for music lyrics. We are busy working on the infrastructure for the Cadenza Lyrics Intelligibility Prediction Challenge (CLIP) that will launch at the start of September.

Lyric intelligibility prediction is an understudied topic with only a couple of studies available. In speech, we're seeing advancements driven by large Language Models, but the equivalent is not available for music. One of the reasons for this is the lack of data where audio is paired with listener scores for intelligibility. This is what our new CLIP1 database will address.

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.

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.