Digitally 'Living' Preservation of Endangered Cultural Soundscapes: From Sampling and Spatial Audio Reconstruction to Interactive Narrative Design

Abstract

Under the dual pressures of global cultural homogenization and intergenerational transmission rupture, endangered cultural soundscapes are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Living sonic texts—such as ritual songs, oral dialects, and festival acoustics—that carry collective memory and local knowledge face irreversible extinction. Traditional archival recordings preserve sound waveforms but strip away spatial orientation, ambient reverberation, and bodily presence, reducing sound to decontextualized specimens rather than perceivable living samples. This study proposes a digital living-preservation pathway structured as ‘sampling–reconstruction–narration.’ First, an integrated multi-dimensional capture mechanism synchronously records source signals and spatial acoustic impulse responses, yielding soundscape data that preserves both timbral detail and spatial information. Second, object-based spatial audio techniques and sound-field reconstruction methods position discrete sources in three-dimensional space according to their original layouts and simulate reverberation, restoring immersive acoustic fields of endangered soundscapes. Third, an interactive digital narrative framework embeds reconstructed spatial soundscapes into participatory narrative structures, enabling listeners to transform from passive reception to active experience with cultural depth. This study contends that digitalization is not a cold replication of endangered cultural soundscapes, but rather a technologically mediated channel through which these sounds become perceivable, participatory, and sustainable, regaining cultural life in the very act of being heard.