  This paper reports on the design and outcomes of the ICASSP SP Clarity
Challenge: Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids. The scenario was a listener
attending to a target speaker in a noisy, domestic environment. There were
multiple interferers and head rotation by the listener. The challenge extended
the second Clarity Enhancement Challenge (CEC2) by fixing the amplification
stage of the hearing aid; evaluating with a combined metric for speech
intelligibility and quality; and providing two evaluation sets, one based on
simulation and the other on real-room measurements. Five teams improved on the
baseline system for the simulated evaluation set, but the performance on the
measured evaluation set was much poorer. Investigations are on-going to
determine the exact cause of the mismatch between the simulated and measured
data sets. The presence of transducer noise in the measurements, lower order
Ambisonics harming the ability for systems to exploit binaural cues and the
differences between real and simulated room impulse responses are suggested
causes
