Towards a Sustainable Crowdsourced Sound Heritage Archive by Public Participation: The Soundsslike Project

Abstract

This paper explains how user-centered design approach shapes a cultural heritage project in the sustainability context. The project aims to protect urban sounds as intangible cultural heritage elements and turn the action of protecting sounds into a collaborative work. Sounds are of great significance in daily urban life and in culture as they carry emotions and awaken cultural memories. Thus, they deserve to be protected and transferred to next generations. In this paper, we first evaluate soundscapes as an intangible cultural heritage element, second we explore the presentation techniques in soundscape studies in the literature, then we explain how the methods implemented step by step, and finally we introduce the two outcomes: the library archive (The Soundscape of Istanbul project) and the crowdsourced web archive (The Soundsslike project). The Soundscape of Istanbul project aims to collect and archive cultural and urban sounds of the city while The Soundsslike project is basically a crowdsourced online sound archive which invites people to record symbolic urban sounds and upload them to the online sound archive. This online platform was built and displayed in an exhibition by means of an interactive tabletop interface to learn more from users and contributors, and to enrich the archive content by raising public awareness of urban sounds.