Vienna's performing arts university specializing in spatial audio, room acoustics, and virtual reality sound for immersive environments.
The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) is Austria's leading conservatory and performing arts university, bringing deep domain expertise in musical acoustics and audio perception to applied research. In H2020, MDW contributed perceptual and musicological knowledge to digital music archiving and led a major research training network in virtual reality audio. Their research work bridges the physics of sound — room acoustics, spatial audio, sound synthesis — with the experiential side of music and performance, making them a rare institution that can validate audio technology from both engineering and artistic perspectives. MDW's researchers work on how sound behaves in real and simulated environments, and how human listeners perceive it — essential input for any VR, gaming, architectural, or broadcast audio application.
MDW coordinated VRACE (2019-2023), a €792K Marie Curie Innovative Training Network specifically focused on virtual reality audio for cyber environments, covering room acoustics, spatial audio, and procedural sound synthesis.
VRACE keywords include structural acoustics, room acoustics, and musical acoustics, reflecting MDW's core scientific territory where architecture, physics, and musical performance intersect.
VRACE explicitly covers audio engineering, procedural audio, and sound synthesis — computational methods for generating and rendering realistic audio in virtual environments.
MDW participated in TROMPA (2018-2021), a project building richer online public-domain music archives, indicating capacity in music information retrieval and digital musicology.
MDW entered H2020 through the digital humanities door — TROMPA (2018) was about enriching online music archives, suggesting an initial focus on music information retrieval and cultural heritage digitization. By 2019, their trajectory shifted decisively toward the physics and engineering of sound: VRACE brought them into structural acoustics, spatial audio simulation, and VR audio rendering, where they took the coordinator role. With only two projects, the shift is stark rather than gradual — from music as cultural artifact to sound as a physical and perceptual phenomenon to be modeled, synthesized, and rendered in virtual spaces.
MDW is moving toward applied acoustic simulation and VR audio — a direction with clear commercial relevance in gaming, architectural design, hearing technology, and immersive media.
MDW operates in both leadership and partner roles, having coordinated VRACE as a Marie Curie training network — a role that requires managing a multi-institution consortium and supervising early-stage researchers across Europe. Their 26 unique partners across 9 countries from just 2 projects suggests they connect into broad, diverse consortia rather than tight specialist clusters. Working with MDW likely means access to a musically and acoustically literate team who can serve as perceptual validators, domain experts, or training hosts for audio-focused research.
MDW has collaborated with 26 unique partners across 9 countries despite only two H2020 projects, indicating integration into well-networked European consortia. Their partnerships span both the digital humanities space (TROMPA) and the audio engineering / VR technology space (VRACE), giving them a cross-disciplinary reach unusual for a conservatory.
MDW is one of very few performing arts universities active in EU research funding, which gives them a genuinely rare profile: they combine formal acoustic science with direct access to professional musicians, concert halls, and performance spaces that serve as living laboratories for acoustic research. For any consortium working on audio perception, spatial sound, or acoustic simulation, MDW offers something industrial or pure-tech partners cannot — ground-truth artistic and perceptual expertise embedded in a functioning music institution. This makes them a credible bridge between engineering-driven audio technology and the human listening experience.
