Cannot change calendar notification sound setting in ipad OS 15

Unfortunately you have encountered some of the new limitations and loss of flexibility that has been (perhaps unintentionally) introduced in iPadOS15. There is no workaround.

If the changes made to configuration options for Mail and Calendar Notifications in iOS/iPadOS15 are causing difficulties, you would be well advised to provide detailed feedback to Apple.

Apple invite constructive comment and feature requests via Apple’s Product Feedback portal:

Feedback - iPad - Apple

iOS/iPadOS15 has introduced significant changes to Notifications and Notification settings. Those relating to Mail and Calendar have changes significantly - losing the granularity of settings available within iOS/iPadOS14 and earlier. It is easiest to explain what is going on by example - and for this exercise, describing the issue in context of Mail is perhaps the clearest…

For Mail Notifications, available settings conflict; it is now impossible to enable sound notifications for any mail account, or VIP category, unless banners are globally enabled for Mail (resulting in Banners and Alerts being generated for every received email).

At present, for Mail, the only way to elicit any sound notification is to deliberately contrive the settings to provide banner-alerts for received email. In dissecting the iPadOS15 Mail Notifications, something is very contrary - and explains why Notification sounds are not generated as expected.

Recognising that the otherwise logical Mail Notifications settings of iPadOS14 have been replaced with the new iPadOS15 implementation, Settings > Notifications > Mail now takes you to a page where you configure the default Notifications behaviour for all of the configured Mail accounts.

From this page, following the Customise Notifications link, takes you to the page where you can now manage Notification delivery for each of your configured Mail accounts:

Note here that the individual accounts are only set for “badges” only. This might explain the lack of sound notifications.

Expanding an individual account entry reveals two further configuration switches…

You’ll note that “Sounds” is not an available option.

Enabling Alerts (not actually wanted) expands the available configuration options:

When returning to the Customise Notification page - where the individual accounts can be configured, we can see that the actions have been updated from Badges - to Alerts, Sounds, Badges:

Sure enough, received Mail will now trigger a banner alert at the top of the screen - and simultaneously the individual sound is heard from the iPad. If the unwanted Banners/Alerts are disabled, so are all sounds.

Calendar Notifications are similarly afflicted. At present, other than globally enabling Banner and Alerts, there is no workaround.

I have exactly the same problem. I can change the general sound of calendar notifications, but this only seems to affect the reminders I get before the events itself. The above reply for mail is completely irrelevant, as mail and calendar notifications seems to work completely different.

For any new invites, it still plays me previously selected sound in iOS 14, and there is no way to change it for the different types of calendar notifications.

To make it clear, I don't need to configure different sounds for them, I would just like that my chosen sound in "settings - notifications - calendar - sound" is applied to all calendar notifications. Of course, in the "customise notifications" all alerts are turned on - but there is nothing more I can do to them except turning them on/off - no more detailled settings are available as shown here in the screenshot (on the iPhone)