The following pages reveal what makes science communication at an arts university special, the challenges that it entails, and the concrete projects and measures through which the mdw is shaping dialogue with various groups of people within and outside of the University.

The Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is an international fixture—seemingly always the same, with the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March as perennial highlights. But is that really true? Is it, as Miss Sophie puts it in Dinner for One, really just “the same procedure as every year”?

In the following conversation, Therese Kaufmann (head of the Office of Research Support), Anna Wukovits-Zethner (Office of Research Support), Ralf von Appen (professor of Theory and History of Popular Music), and Bianca Jasmina Rauch (film scholar and freelance journalist) provide mdw Magazine with some impressions from their experiences with science communication.

Science communication is often thought of as conveying scientific findings to others in an accessible way. And while that is true, it’s only part of the story. In actual fact, science communication doesn’t begin only once research has been completed, when it’s time to explain its outcomes to a wider public. It actually begins wherever and whenever scientific or scholarly knowledge relates to societal issues, experiences, and conflicts.

the mdw’s Long Night of Research activities, coordinated since their beginning in 2016 by the Office of Research Support, have by now developed into a permanent fixture of the University’s event calendar that motivates numerous colleagues to get involved.The mdw’s contributions to LNF2026 provided an impressive demonstration of just how diverse, accessible, and lively the ways are in which the arts and research can be combined.

TENOR 26 Vienna is part of the research project “Sound as Score”, elements of which are being funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and organised in Vienna by the mdw and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Of the over 100 submissions that the conference received, 30 papers, nine workshops, four posters, and 18 sound-based works were ultimately presented.

Magdalena Severin’s final lesson of the day has just ended, and her students are still leaving the classroom as she sits down to talk with mdw Magazine. Here at the Döblinger Gymnasium (BG19), an academic secondary school, she’s now spending Monday through Thursday teaching students of various ages. Originally hired to teach music here, she recently added German—her second teaching subject.