ICASSP 2026 Grand Challenge • Pioneering the Future of Audio Technology
ICASSP 2026 Grand Challenge: We invite researchers, engineers, and audio enthusiasts worldwide to participate in the first-ever Music Source Restoration (MSR) Challenge. We target on restoring individual instruments to their original, unprocessed state from mixtures that have undergone various audio transformations.
This challenging scenario differs from traditional source separation where mixtures are assumed to be simple sums of unprocessed sources. MSR's requirement for generative solutions is crucial for real-world audio production including:
Participants are encouraged to innovatively use open-source data or propose new data sources, including synthetic data generation methods. Reference pipeline scripts will be provided. To ensure fairness, all newly created data and pipelines must be submitted and shared by October 28.
Emphasizes accurate recovery of original stem waveforms with focus on signal restoration
Prioritizes perceptual similarity and musical coherence
Based on blind subjective ratings from professional engineers
Eight target stems will be evaluated: vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass, synthesizers, drums, percussion, and orchestral elements.
The blind test set includes 500 clips from four challenging scenarios:
Complete training and evaluation code for U-Net and BSRNN baseline systems will be provided.
Be part of this groundbreaking ICASSP 2026 Grand Challenge that bridges academic research with professional audio engineering.
Register Now