The ICASSP SP Cadenza Challenge: Music Demixing/Remixing for Hearing Aids

Abstract: 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.