Music Demixing Challenge at ISMIR 2021

Music source separation has been intensively studied in the last decade and tremendous progress with the advent of deep learning could be observed. Evaluation campaigns such as MIREX or SiSEC connected state-of-the-art models and corresponding papers, which can help researchers integrate the best practices into their models. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly difficult to measure real-world performance as the music separation community had to rely on a limited amount of test data and was biased towards specific genres and mixing styles. To address these issues, we designed the Music Demixing (MDX) Challenge on a crowd-based machine learning competition platform where the task is to separate stereo songs into four instrument stems (Vocals, Drums, Bass, Other). The main differences compared with the past challenges are 1) the competition is designed to more easily allow machine learning practitioners from other disciplines to participate and 2) evaluation is done on a hidden test set created by music professionals dedicated exclusively to the challenge to assure the transparency of the challenge, i.e., the test set is not included in the training set. In this paper, we provide the details of the datasets, baselines, evaluation metrics, evaluation results, and technical challenges for future competitions.