Aural Heritage Preservation

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) supported an interdisciplinary research project called "Digital Preservation and Access to Aural Heritage via a Scalable, Extensible Method." This project focuses on preserving aural heritage, which involves documenting and recreating the auditory experience of culturally important places using physics-based reconstructions of acoustical dynamics.

Dr. Doyuen Ko, associate professor of audio engineering at Belmont University's Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, and his co-principal investigators, Dr. Sungyoung Kim and Dr. Miriam Kolar, develop, test, and share their aural heritage process via three case studies, which represent culturally, architecturally and temporally distinct examples of endangered aural heritage:

• Columbia recording studios on Nashville's historic Music Row.
• The Rochester Savings Bank, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
• The interior architecture of the 3,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Site at Chavín de Huántar, Peru.

The project aims to create an extensible research framework that others can apply in acoustical fieldwork across various cultural heritage contexts; therefore, we selected three contrasting case-study sites to evaluate extensible fieldwork practices via cross-comparison. This research also provides best-practice recommendations for aural heritage data collection that address the pragmatics of access and constituencies surrounding cultural heritage sites. If you want to learn more about the project, visit the following websites:

http://www.auralheritage.org/