Pedro Coelho from EBU radio Member RTP (Portugal) is the winner of this year's Ars Acustica jingle competition. This was the second year of the competition which aimed to find a jingle for the 2009 EBU Ars Acustica Special Evening 'Art’s Birthday' which will be held on 16 January 2009, 19.00-23.00 GMT. The theme for 2009 is ”Safe and Sound”.

In a rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable world, safety has become a major concern at many levels of public and private life. Governments, institutions and individuals are deploying extreme efforts in order to protect themselves from any kind of threat – presumed or real, manmade or natural. Sound plays a major role in the perception and communication of both safety and insecurity. 

Throughout its history, art has regularly made use of sound both to establish and disturb human nature. One of the most famous cases in point is a major work of 20th-century radio art, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, which produced a mass panic by suggesting a fictitious invasion from Mars. 

For Art’s Birthday 2009, the EBU Ars Acustica Group proposes listening to the sounds of safety and exploring the artistic power to make the familiar sound ominous and the odd reassuring. 

Click here to listen to the winning jingle. 

Click here for more information on the EBU Ars Acustica.