From: Matthias Frank via Brinkmann, Fabian via ak discourse
Subject: [Sursound] Call: Europe’s Tenth Student 3D Audio Production Competition, Nov. 2026
Date: 20. April 2026
Dear colleagues & friends,
We happily announce the call for Europe’s Tenth Student 3D Audio Production Competition, and IEM Graz will host the event in cooperation with vdt (German tonmeisters) and Sounding Future and present the final ranks of the finalists in a public ceremony at Ligeti hall in Graz (Nov. 13th) live and via internet live stream, complemented by on-demand browser playback via Cat3DA (see https://tonmeister.org/en/rubrics/3d-audio-competition/2025/ for last year’s finalists).
Also this year, the Austrian ORF Ö1 radio station and its contemporary music festival ORF musikprotokoll will be our partners to host a pre-final public presentation (Oct. 8th 2026) of the category 1 finalists at Dom im Berg, Graz.
We encourage all students who deal with spatial music, spatial recording, or who are interested in spatial-ized sound to participate by submitting short works to the Ninth Student 3D Audio Production Competition for one of the three categories:
(1) contemporary / computer music (11min),
(2) audio drama / documentary / soundscapes (4min),
(3) music recording / studio production (4min).
The format requirements for preparing a submission and exemplary tools to check are given here https://iaem.at/ambisonics/s3dapc/2026 and of course you can get in touch if there are questions:
The submission portal
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=s3dapc2026
is open until July 5th 2026.
An international jury will assess the submissions concerning the creative and technical quality, providing feedback to all the participants of the competition. Based on the resulting ranking, the finalists will be selected for presentation at our award ceremony at Ligeti hall in Graz on November 13th 2026. Moreover, finalist works for category (1) will be presented at musikprotokoll festival of the Austrian contemporary/classic radio program (ORF OE1) on October 8th. The finalists will be notified and requested to (virtually) attend the meeting to receive their award, the jury’s comments, and say a few words about their submissions.
The nominated submissions will be made available via the Cat3DA player at tonmeister.org for head-tracked binaural playback on demand, and we will air a live video stream of the S3DAPC finals over the internet. The S3DAPC finals with the awards ceremony will be the platform to present and celebrate the nominees and their submissions.
We encourage institutions with loudspeaker facilities and space for this celebration to organize live breakout sessions. These are connected via stereo live stream for the speech parts of the event, but local listeners enjoy 5th-order playback of the submissions on loudspeakers.
Best regards,
Matthias Franz
Franz Zotter