  "Foley" refers to sound effects that are added to multimedia during
post-production to enhance its perceived acoustic properties, e.g., by
simulating the sounds of footsteps, ambient environmental sounds, or visible
objects on the screen. While foley is traditionally produced by foley artists,
there is increasing interest in automatic or machine-assisted techniques
building upon recent advances in sound synthesis and generative models. To
foster more participation in this growing research area, we propose a challenge
for automatic foley synthesis. Through case studies on successful previous
challenges in audio and machine learning, we set the goals of the proposed
challenge: rigorous, unified, and efficient evaluation of different foley
synthesis systems, with an overarching goal of drawing active participation
from the research community. We outline the details and design considerations
of a foley sound synthesis challenge, including task definition, dataset
requirements, and evaluation criteria.
