The Clarity & Cadenza Challenges

Clarity (Speech in noise) and Cadenza (music) are two EPSRC projects that are exploiting the latest in machine learning to create improved listening experiences for those with a hearing loss. In both we are running a series of open competitions, for which entrants are challenged to improve and personalise the audio for listeners with a hearing loss. This challenge methodology fosters a new research community devoted to making music and speech more accessible, as well as creating open-source tools and databases to facilitate future investigations. The challenges pose a variety of dilemmas to the competitors: for instance, while a hearing aid must manipulate live speech with low latency and limited computing power, recorded music from consumer devices can be pre-processed with non-causal techniques using cloud computing. In this presentation we will update the latest news on the third Clarity challenge and the first Cadenza challenge and report on all the open-access computational tools and rating scales we have developed.