Aalto student team won gold at the 6th European Students 3D audio competition
A team of four Aalto University students 鈥 Pietari Nurmi, Kamila Kondraciuk, Mia Savo and Teodors Kerimovs 鈥 won the gold medal in Category 2: Audio Drama / Documentary / Soundscapes at the 6th European Students 3D audio competition. The winning project was the Spatial Audio Book (fairy tale) "Hansel and Gretel" which could be called a proof of concept for spatially mixed audiobooks.
The competition is a cooperation of the Institut f眉r Elektronische Musik und Akustik der Kunstuniversit盲t Graz (IEM) and Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (VDT), and this year for the first time also with the ORF musikprotokoll. The fourth partner is the FH St. P枚lten, on whose Audio Mostly the semi-finals took place. The award ceremony took place on Saturday, October 8 in Graz, Austria as part of the ORF musikprotokoll festival.
The team describes the winning project and its background:
鈥淚n recent years the popularity of audio books, podcasts and other forms of audio-based storytelling have skyrocketed. In this production, we wanted to add an extra dimension to auditory storytelling using spatial audio techniques, sound design and music. This is a proof-of-concept of a 3-dimensional ambisonics audiobook.
We used the famous children鈥檚 story 'Hansel and Gretel' from the Grimms' Fairy Tales, and adapted it into a five-minute audio drama. We recorded narrator and dialog parts, designed sound effects, and composed original music to serve the story. These audio elements were then spatialized and mixed in 5th order ambisonics to create 3D immersive sound scenes for the story. The piece was mixed in Reaper using IEM and SPARTA spatialization tools. The mix was first drafted in a home studio environment, and later finalized at Aalto Immersive sound studio using a multi-channel speaker system.
We are a multi-talented team coming from various fields of science and arts, but sharing the same passion for audio and storytelling. We are based in Helsinki region, in Finland, and connected by Aalto University. In fact, this piece was originally produced as a course work for 鈥淚mmersive Sound鈥 course here at Aalto University.
With this short piece, we want to show the potential of immersive audio as a storytelling device. Although this story is most effective when enjoyed through a multichannel loudspeaker system, ambisonics and binaural (bainoural) decoding have brought immersive audio closer to an average person than ever before. Consumer-level head-tracking headphones are becoming more and more affordable, which opens a whole new market for immersive audio content. This may be your first touch on an ambisonics audiobook, but will it be the last? We will see鈥︹
The student team and their initial idea were formed as final project work in a course called Immersive Sound taught by Sebastian J. Schlecht, Nils Mayer-Khalen and Andrea Mancianti.
You can enjoy the story by visiting the
Read more news
Aalto University and Bocconi University to launch a double degree programme in strategic and creative marketing
The first cohort, 10 students admitted through Aalto and 10 through Bocconi, will start their studies in autumn 2027
Student exchange in Europe? Unite! can take you there
Aalto is a member of Unite!, a European university alliance that gives students the opportunity to internationalise their degrees both online and in-person. Join the webinar to find out more.
Opinion: Finnish language learning should be integrated into degree programs
In this opinion piece, Rebekka Nylund, an expert at the University of Helsinki, and Elisa R盲s盲nen, a university lecturer at Aalto University, reflect on what they have learned from the EU-co-funded Language-supported Knowledge Pathways project and offer suggestions on how and why learning Finnish could be integrated into the structures of higher education degree programs.