Digital Archive for Japanese Intangible Cultural Heritage Based on Reproduction of High-Fidelity Sound Field in Yamahoko Parade of Gion Festival

We digitally archived festival music signals (“Ohayashi”) in the Yamahoko parades of Gion festival in Kyoto, Japan. Besides, the festival music, which consists of Japanese traditional drums, flutes, bells, ambient noise and in-float driving noise are needed to reproduce the authentic atmosphere of this festival. To reproduce a high-quality sound field, we recorded the festival music in the presence of ambient noise and float noise by using multi-channel recording. We reproduced the sound field of one of the parades with the recorded sound sources. We employed point-source loudspeakers for reproducing Japanese traditional drums, flutes, and bells with omni-directional radiation characteristics. After that, we built a web-based system linked to a map of the parade route that would produce an acoustic sound field with realistic sensations at different points along the route. This system reproduces the Ohayashi at particular positions along the route when the user clicks circular buttons on the map.