Sound Art · 2026-08-07
An Arctic sound diary wins Europe’s radio-art prize
This year’s Prix Palma Ars Acustica, the EBU’s radio-art award, went to James Welburn for Longyearbyen, recorded in Svalbard. Austria’s Ö1 presented the finalists in a three-part series.
This year's Prix Palma Ars Acustica went to James Welburn, a British sound artist and film composer based in Oslo, for Longyearbyen: Life at the Edge of Industry and Wilderness. The fifty-two-minute piece was entered by Austria's ORF and premiered in 2025 on Austrian public radio (Ö1). Welburn recorded his soundscapes in binaural stereo in Longyearbyen, in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The soundscapes, partly spontaneous and partly staged, were then merely cut and placed one after another. The sound world of people living in the Arctic has inspired other artists too: Hungarian Radio also broadcast the Danish Niels Peter Juel Larsen's At the Edge of the Ice Field, which portrayed the lives of Greenlandic seal hunters through the microphone. That piece won the Prix Futura in 1985.
Rebroadcast on 20 July, the work can still be heard on the ORF website.
The Prix Palma Ars Acustica is the international radio-art prize of the Ars Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU): it rewards works of sound art, media art, text-sound composition and electroacoustic music, and only editors at EBU member stations may submit entries.
Cast & Crew
- Prize-winning artist James Welburn
- Finalist Martin Ožvold
- Finalist Tomáš Šenkyřík
- Presenter (Ö1) Anna Soucek
Sources: ORF Ö1 — Europäische Radiokunst (the finalists, part 2) (2026-07-13) · ORF Ö1 — the Prix Palma Ars Acustica winner (2026-07-20) · EBU — Palma Ars Acustica official page (2026) · Martin Ožvold’s official site (2026)
AI involvement — Research: partly · Writing: partly · Verification: partly. The article is based on machine translation of original texts in German, English.