Capturing, Analyzing, and Transmitting Intangible Cultural Heritage with the i-Treasures Project

The i-Treasures project, which officially began on 1 February 2013, is a 12-partner FP7 project that proposes to use multi- sensor technology to capture, preserve, and transmit four types of intangible cultural heritage, referred to as 'use cases': rare traditional songs, rare dance interactions, traditional craftsmanship and contemporary music composition. Methodologies used will include body and gesture recognition, vocal tract modeling, speech processing and electroencephalography (EEG). The "Rare traditional songs" use case, which will be the focus of our work, targets Corsican "cantu in Paghjella", Sardinian "Canto a tenore", Mt. Athos Greek byzantine hymns and the recent "Human beat box" styles. The final objective of the "Rare traditional songs" use case is to capture vocal tract movements with sufficient accuracy to drive a real-time 2D or 3D avatar of the vocal tract, which will in turn play a crucial role in the transmitting of captured invisible cultural heritage to future generations. The acquisition sensors are: multi-sensor helmet, nose-mounted accelerometer, camera, ultrasound probe, Electroglottograph, Microphone and breathing belt. This system is described in this study, and also the vocal tract modeling, the preliminary data processing, and the extracting tongue contour method.