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RUA KITA

FAR OUT SOLUTIONS · SABAH, BORNEO

A sound archive that stays with the people it came from.

Rua Kita documents Sabah’s traditional instruments — the sompoton, the tawak, the togunggak, the sundatang and others — as sound, as objects, and as knowledge held by named people in named places. It is a cultural-preservation project, not a music app with a heritage skin.

The test we hold every screen to: if it would still work with the instrument names swapped out, it is wrong.

Captured so far

Instruments
9
Gaussian splats
6
Photogrammetry meshes
6
Raw capture data
0.52 GB

Every instrument was captured twice over — once as geometry and once as a gaussian splat where the object allowed it. The raw captures total 0.52 GB, which is roughly 140× the budget for a page, so the web build ships real capture stills now and interactive 3D once the conversion pipeline (decimation, Draco, KTX2, SOG/SPZ) has run.

Three phases

  1. Phase 1

    The archive

    Nine instruments captured. Field recordings, cultural notes reviewed with knowledge holders, working search, and consent recorded against every asset.

    In build
  2. Phase 2

    The sound machine

    Layer and remix the archive in a browser, tuned to measured field intervals. Every export carries a credit manifest naming the communities it came from.

    Next
  3. Phase 3

    The room

    A museum-scale immersive install: touch-first, motion-triggered, running offline on local media. Designed as a build target now so it is not a rewrite later.

    Planned

Community partners

  • PACOS Trust

    Partners of Community Organisations in Sabah. Reviews consent records and cultural notes.

  • SCENIC

    Collaborating on documentation and community engagement.

What we still need

  • — Field recordings: multi-intensity takes per instrument, with the player named and consenting. One composed master exists; nothing else.
  • — Measured tuning per instrument, in cents, from those recordings.
  • — Cultural notes reviewed by knowledge holders, in Bahasa Malaysia and English.
  • — Consent documents. Until these exist, nothing can be published.
  • — Names: players, makers, elders, translators, engineers.