Download the song : click here

12th of February 2015 – 30 participants gathered at Petalusa, Sao Paulo, Brazil. With one day to Carnaval we decided to create a song about our experiences of festivals. Almost everyone has had some form of transformational experience at a festival or a big party and we chose this theme to explore.

With a live percussion section and two excellent facilitators collaborating to facilitate the session, namely Zuza Gonçalves and Pedro Consorte, we were in very good hands to create our song.

Following a vocal/physical warmup led by Pedro, we told our stories of festival. Words were transcribed and lyrics written. We then played a poetry game led by Zuza where we formed a chorus for the song.

It was then onto sound making! Unfortunately it was a bit of a technical nightmare with our speaker blowing up before the event, and the computer failing to keep the recording in synch.

The group started making sounds inspired by their lyrics – “ahhh goosbumps!” I managed to record some of these sounds and also some of the circle singing you hear at the start of the track. I also managed to record some percussive sounds which I looped to form the beat of the song.

However, it got to the point where the recording and looping stopped working, so we decided to build the song step by step using our memories to build towards a final performance.

Building the song without recording the layers of the song step by step using the computer, was a first for The Human Sound Project – in reflection, this was a really good experience because it showed how much can be accomplished without technology. That you can build a whole song with a group, live and in the moment.

This is what you hear in the second half of this track. I recorded the full song with my portable recorder and have added it to the second half of the song for you to get a taste of.

All in all this track is a bit of a mash up – the first half using the samples I managed to record at the first half of the session and the second half the recording of the final performance.

The last 10 or so seconds of the song contains a beautiful recording of a part of a circle song I just had to include!

A very big thank you to Juliane Petalusa for having us.

Enjoy!

Video documentary on the day: