Intangible Treasures – Capturing the Intangible Cultural Heritage and Learning the Rare Know-How of Living Human Treasures

Cultural expression is not limited to architecture, monuments or collections of artifacts. It also includes fragile intangible live expressions, which involve knowledge and skills. Such expressions include music, dance, singing, theatre, human skills and craftsmanship. These manifestations of human intelligence and creativeness constitute our Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), which is at the same time traditional, contemporary and living, because it does not only refer to inherited knowledge but also to the renewal of contemporary cultural expressions. It refers to the past, to the present, and, certainly to the future and is the mainspring of humanity's cultural diversity.

The main objective of i-Treasures is to develop an open and extendable platform to provide access to ICH resources, enable knowledge exchange between researchers and contribute to the transmission of rare know-how from Living Human Treasures to apprentices. To this end, the project aims to go beyond the mere digitization of cultural content. Its main contribution is the creation of new knowledge by proposing novel methodologies and new technological paradigms for the analysis and modeling of ICH. One of the main objectives of the proposal is the development of an appropriate methodology based on multisensory technology for the creation of information (intangible treasures) that has never been analyzed or studied before.

Within i-Treasures project, the usability of the platform will be demonstrated in four different case studies:

• Rare Traditional Songs,
• Rare Dance Interactions,
• Traditional Craftsmanship and
• Contemporary Music Composition.

For the extraction of a novel set of ICH data and the creation of new knowledge, multisensory technology will be employed. The project participants will strive to adapt the proposed technology to the specific conditions and needs of each of these use cases.