Smart devices for Intangible Cultural Heritage fruition

This paper proposes a novel approach to the fruition of Intangible Cultural Heritage exploiting the technical features of smart devices. In particular, it presents a framework for a “sound tourism”, in which the perception of sites is directly transmitted by the voice of the local communities through the creation of an app model for the fruition of landscape, places, and locations by means of oral archives. That is, the app model aims at boosting the added value of Intangible Cultural Heritage (e.g. popular music, oral history, languages and accents, local tradition, and folklore) by re-using it in real application environments (e.g. for tourist purposes). The proposed solution rejects the use of a smartphone as a mere displayer of information embracing an innovative philosophy that considers the smart device as a tool for the playback of audio material stored in sound archives, leaving the user free to enjoy the site he/she is visiting without the need to interact with a screen.