Workshop: ęmí: freedomsong | The Humming Score (RSVP)
Sound & Culture Summit
ęmí: freedomsong | The Humming Score is a participatory ritual and collective score for breath, voice, love, grief and relation, led by artists Rohan Ayinde and Tayo Rapoport.
Rooted in the Yoruba concept of ęmí—the breath that animates life—and with Black radical traditions of collective imagination and liberation, the score explores how grief, love and political possibility can be held and transformed through shared practice. Emerging from an urgency to speak against cultures of silence in the face of violence and oppression, the work asks how voices might gather, resonate, and become part of longer histories of collective struggle and liberation.
Participants are invited into a 40-minute collective humming ritual, creating a shared field of sound where individual voices remain present while becoming part of a larger resonance. Within this space, Rohan and Tayo introduce spoken text, improvisation and samples, allowing fragments of language and sound from different times and places to enter into dialogue with the collective hum.
The humming score is followed by a shared screening of the 2-screen ęmí: freedomsong film and a collective conversation, extending the ritual into a space of reflection, exchange and shared meaning-making. Together, these practices create a landscape where breath, sound, image and dialogue become ways of encountering grief, love, protest and possibility.
Rather than presenting the artwork as a finished object, the workshop invites participants into the ongoing life of the project: a ritual technology for practicing relation and collective imagination.
This workshop is RSVP, so make sure to pre-register here to secure your spot!
Photography by Noah Schielen
The Sound & Culture Summit is supported by TIMES (The Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes) and co-financed by the EU.
