Black Arts & Decolonial Sciences

I begin with Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism:

“I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. […] The Indians massacred, the Moslem world drained of itself, the Chinese world defiled and perverted for a good century; the Negro world disqualified; mighty voices stilled forever; homes scattered to the wind; all this wreckage, all this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think all that does not have its price?”

Césaire’s words anchor my inquiry: What has all this devastation cost science?

I call the forms of knowledge resulting from this devastation Colonial Science—forms entangled with imperial domination, extraction, and epistemic violence. This is a science complicit in genocides, ethnocides, and ecocides, bound to the horrors Césaire describes. Yet, other sciences exist—Decolonial Sciences—knowledges produced by and for colonized peoples in both defiance of and divergence from Empire’s machinery of brutalization.

The “brute matter” and “brute facts” of Colonial Science are not givens: they are made by Colonial Science through processes of brutalization. Colonizers submit beings to scientific study not out of curiosity but with the intent to brutalize—to make efficient use of force, disintegrate, break down into bits, and transform subjects into perversely pleasurable and profitable datum for collection, correction, consumption, and deletion.

It is only when beings resist brutalization in remarkable ways that Colonial Science calls in its specialists in complexity, chaos, indeterminacy, and noise—its reinforcements for risk management and damage control. At this stage, Colonial Science endeavors to marginalize those beings remarkable for resisting brutalization, reducing them to special cases, subjects for specialized knowledge, and thus rendering them inaccessible to the global majority.

Decolonial Sciences, however, are committed to:

(i) Deconstructing the colonial practices of brutalization and specialization entrenched in the colonial techno-scientific imagination.

(ii) (Re-)constructing “other-whys” that enable knowledge producers and wisdom keepers to approach beings otherwise than through brutalization and specialization.

Given my background and musical sensibilities, I am particularly drawn to the Decolonial Sciences of African and Afro-diasporic peoples, especially their radical experiments with sound. As Dhanveer Singh Brar, drawing on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, explains:

Historically, [Black] slaves were refused access to written language and textual mechanics as part of the racial codification of the modern subject. Thus […] the phonic and the aural became the engines for communicative and performative practice amongst the enslaved. […] [S]uch a maneuver had two effects: one, the seemingly senseless noise-making of the slaves only confirmed the perception of their pre-modernity on the part of those who traded and owned them; two, such presumptions allowed New World blacks to nuance and experiment with the sonic as a field of expression with only relatively minor interference. Such partial autonomy was crucial […] because it allowed black diasporans to develop a socially inflected sonic technology known as ‘antiphony (call and response).’

Brar reveals how colonial dismissal of Black sound as “senseless noise” inadvertently created a fugitive space where sound became a site of experimental knowledge—relational, adaptive, and deeply philosophical.

Yet, the history of the Black diaspora is too often framed as one of rupture, as if the violence of the transatlantic slave trade severed African peoples from their cultural roots entirely. A more fitting metaphor is diffraction: a bending and scattering that transforms rather than destroys. The Door of No Return and the Middle Passage were not points of total severance but apertures through which African cosmologies were diffracted into new forms—warped, yet enduring.

The forced displacement of African peoples did not erase cultural continuities but revealed their transformative potential. Polyrhythms, call-and-response structures, possession rituals, and ubuntu-rooted communal practices traversed the Middle Passage not as broken fragments but as dynamic forces. Adapting to and through the Indigenous and European worldviews they encountered, these forces generated hybrid spiritual and sonic technologies capable of resisting and persisting despite profound violence.

To borrow a phrase from Amiri Baraka, the “changing same” of Afro-diasporic traditions reveals diffraction as a generative process—continuity not as rupture, but as expansion and transformation. Yoruba Egungun masquerades, which honor the ancestral dead, find echoes in Haitian Vodou’s Gede spirits—irreverent figures who mend the breach between life and death through humor and ritual. The Kongo cosmogram, a sacred map of the crossroads as a site of spiritual convergence, (re-)encounters and (re-)combines with the Yoruba orisha of the crossroads, Eshu, to be transfigured into Haitian Vodou’s Papa Legba and his veve cosmogram. The divinatory wisdom of Ifá, carried by enslaved Yoruba, transformed into Santería’s and Candomblé’s cowrie shell readings—each adapting to new geographies while retaining core structures for producing relationality, revelation, and transformation.

These lineages reveal that the sonic and spiritual technologies of the Niger-Congo continuum—a linguistic, rhythmic, and psychic field that traversed the African continent—flowed through the Door of No Return and endured the Middle Passage not as shattered fragments but as diffracted/diffracting waves, scattering while amplifying their generative force.

Returning to the core of my inquiry, I propose that the Black Arts—and Black music in particular—have long served as modes and expressions of Decolonial Science. These sonic technologies, deeply philosophical and profoundly relational, have often been disqualified from the category of “science” precisely because they had to cloak themselves in what colonial authority dismissed as “senseless noise.” Yet beneath this misreading lies a vast reservoir of experimental knowledge—one that continues to resist, adapt, and transform under colonial violence.

What I am offering you today will do little for those bound to the frameworks of Colonial Science. But it may speak powerfully to those seeking to break free from the logics of colonial domination and produce a Decolonial Science—an epistemic praxis in apposition and opposition to Empire.

Indeed, those still beholden to the frameworks of Colonial Science may struggle to recognize what I present here as “science” at all. For the refusal to acknowledge the profound depths of African and Afro-diasporic knowledge systems—their philosophy, methodology, and radical relationality—remains part of the price science continues to pay for Empire’s disqualification of the Negro world.

Break Beats, Blue Notes, Ring Shouts

Epistemics of the Black Radical Tradition

The paradigmatic sonic inventions of African and Afro-diasporic knowledge systems are three: break beats, blue notes, and ring shouts. To understand these paradigmatic inventions, one must develop a sense of rhythm, both metrical and spectral.

A metrical rhythm consists of pulses slow enough to be perceived as a sequence of discrete pulsations or beats—time articulated through countable moments.

A spectral rhythm consists of pulses so rapid they blur into a continuous vibration, perceived simultaneously as pitch and timbre, sustained over varying durations.

Polyrhythm emerges when multiple rhythms co-exist, generating tension between concurrent patterns.

Metrical polyrhythm layers multiple discrete pulsations or beats, each articulated according to a distinct meter.

Spectral polyrhythm layers multiple continuous vibrations, each articulated according to a distinct frequency.

In African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms, John Miller Chernoff makes the following observations about metrical polyrhythm:

If the rhythmic systems used by different African people are not the same (though they are often surprisingly similar), they at least have in common the fact that they are complex. […] In African music, there are always at least two rhythms going on. Musicologists call this polymeter or multiple meter, the simultaneous use of different meters. African music cannot be notated without assigning different meters to the different instruments in an ensemble.

The effect of polymetric music is as if different rhythms were competing for our attention. No sooner do we grasp one rhythm than we lose track of it and hear another. Each musician contributes their own part in a total polymetric fabric.

Yet Chernoff, despite this profound insight, repeatedly underemphasizes half of his own observation. Throughout the book, he describes African music as “music-to-find-the-beat-by,” while neglecting the equally vital dimension: losing the beat. The essence of African rhythm lies in the generative tension between losing and finding the beat. To borrow his own language, African music is as much “music-to-lose-the-beat-to” as it is “music-to-find-the-beat-by.” Indeed, it is the break beat—the cross beat that encourages and enables us to lose one beat and, at the same moment, find another—that constitutes the music’s most characteristic feature. African music, then, might be more accurately described as music-to-break-to, a break being by turns (i) the breakdown of a beat-being-lost and (ii) the breakthrough of a beat-being-found.

This framework clarifies Chernoff’s subsequent claim:

The fundamental characteristic of African music is the way the music works with time in the dynamic clash and interplay of cross rhythms. There is always more than one “time” in the music. In Western music and Western science, “time” is treated as a single, objective phenomenon, moving in steady intervals towards some distant moment. Western music is about ordering sound through time, imposing a strict order on time. In contrast, in the African context, both the musician and the spectator maintain an additional rhythm (an additional time) to give coherence to the ensemble. The essential point is the need to mediate the rhythms actively. In the Western context, when several tones are heard together, they are taken as a unity, and the term harmony or chord expresses the oneness of the sound. In African music, there are different beats and variations that fit within the beat; and one participates in the music by integrating various rhythms to perceive the beat. The beat arises from the whole relationship of the rhythms rather than from any particular part. The most relevant feature of African music is that the way rhythms are established in relationship creates a tension in time. African music depends on the resistance of the parts to fuse. The music is engaging because the tension must be comprehended without undermining the power and vitality that comes from conflict between different rhythms.

Even in this otherwise brilliant passage, Chernoff’s assertion that “African music depends on the resistance of the parts to fuse” might be more accurately reframed: African music depends on the insistence and persistence of the break.

What the break beat represents for metrical rhythms in African music, the blue note represents for spectral rhythms. Just as one can speak of losing and finding the beat in metrical polyrhythm, one can speak of losing and finding the note in spectral polyrhythm.

To understand what is at stake here, it is important to recognize that spectral rhythm accounts not only for pitch but also for timbre—the unique texture of sound created by variations in how a note vibrates. Two instruments, like a trumpet and a violin, intoning the same pitch will sound different because their harmonic overtones—those subtle, overlapping frequencies—oscillate in unique patterns. Likewise, a single instrument, like a piano, intoning the same pitch but with a different attack—a hammer blow versus a light touch—will sound different because the style of the attack alters the harmonic overtones.

In addition to the previously examined propensity for multiple meter, a critical feature of African music is the ubiquity of a percussive performance style and the importance of the manner in which a player attacks their instrument. Whereas in Western tonal frameworks, the most desirable attack tends to land directly on its intended pitch, in African musics, the most desirable attack often percussively lands elsewhere before winding up at its intended pitch and wavering around it.

This percussive landing, winding up, and wavering produces a spectral polyrhythm akin to the metrical polyrhythms that characterize African musics: overlapping spectral rhythms that do not fuse into orderly harmonic alignment but, rather, continually drift out of strict harmonic synchrony. This attack pattern is experienced by the listener as a blue note: a harmonic drift, a losing and finding of a note, that betrays a spectral polyrhythmicity.

Given the break beat and the blue note, some might say that African musicians play around the beat or off-beat, and that they play around the note or off-key. This, however, is inaccurate, for it is the ability to identify the on-beat and on-key note that enables the listener to engage with the music fully. Musicians play in such a way that finding the on-beat and on-key note becomes both a sensual and intellectual challenge for the listener.

To experience African music, one must be able to hold in mind an additional beat and note beyond what is heard. Whenever the player moves off-beat or off-key, breaking the beat or drifting into the blue, they do so in a way that calls the listener to respond on-beat and on-key.

This dynamic tension distinguishes the antiphonies of African music from those in Western traditions. The call-and-response invites not passive following but active participation, transforming the listener into a sense-maker—dancing, clapping, and singing along on-beat and on-key in response to calls that break off-beat and drift off-key in to the blue. In other words, the players position themselves as accompaniment, generating off-beat and off-key conditions for the listeners to take the lead in sense-making.

More profoundly still, as the listener takes the lead and loses themself in sense-making, they tend to find themselves charged with taking on the role of accompaniment—dancing, clapping, and singing off-beat (break beats) and off-key (blue notes) so as to invite others into the space of sense-making alongside them. Just as the break beat and blue note create tension through losing and finding rhythm and pitch, so too do the roles of player and listener, caller and responder, continuously dissolve and emerge within the confluence of participatory antiphony. The responder loses themself as responder, becoming the caller, while the caller loses themself as caller, becoming the responder.

Synecdochically, we will refer to such practices of improvisatory and participatory antiphony, call-and-response, as “ring shouts”—the ring shout being an exemplary form of this practice. Originating in African diasporic spiritual practices, the ring shout involves a communal, polyrhythmic dance where participants move counterclockwise in a circle, singing, clapping, and stomping while responding to a lead caller. The shifting roles of caller and responder, dancer and accompanist, make the ring shout a living embodiment of collective sense-making through rhythm and voice. 

Western(ized) consumers who primarily encounter African and Afro-diasporic musical products in the processed and commodified forms preferred by the culture industry—extracted from the communities and contexts that informed their emergence—may hear the break beats and blue notes but fail to recognize them as calls, invitations for antiphonal participation that transform passive listening into a collective practice of sense-making. They remain consumers.

Western(ized) academics, who similarly encounter African and Afro-diasporic musical products in these degraded forms or, when not that, engage them as distant observers and theorists—whether as anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, or other humanities researchers—often fail to recognize these calls for antiphonal participation. And when they do recognize the calls, they too often fail to respond to them, choosing instead to “observe” and “theorize” rather than participate and invite others to participate.

Yet break beats, blue notes, and ring shouts are neither mere phonographic material for commodification and consumption nor ethnographic material for observation and theorization. They are paradigmatic vehicles for the dissemination and experimentation of a Decolonial Science.

Today, my aim is not merely to theorize this Decolonial Science but to practice it with you—by involving you directly in the making of what the authorities of Colonial Science are bound to dismiss as “senseless noise.”

Futurhythmachines

From Data Collection and Analysis to Signal Sampling & Synthesis 

Colonial Science brutalizes us into bits of data to be collected and analyzed, seeking to rationally represent phenomena by reducing our complexity to visual and symbolic abstractions.

By contrast, drawing upon the (re-)creative methodologies of Black electronic dance musics, we will experiment with decolonial practices of signal sampling and synthesis—methodologies that run counter to colonial practices of data extraction and analysis. Our aim is not to represent phenomena through reductive models but to intuitively sense phenomena that elude representational and analytical frameworks. Using the layered polyrhythms and participatory antiphonies characteristic of Black electronic dance musics, the practices of sampling and synthesis we will explore today engage with phenomena dynamically, attuning to their resonances and relational patterns.

Turning to Gilbert Simondon’s processual and synthetic notion of information—and away from Claude Shannon’s rational and analytic paradigm—this project in decolonial science proposes a shift in how we engage with data. Where Shannon’s model fixates on the transmission of discrete bits, Simondon emphasizes the dynamic emergence of form and meaning through relational fields of resonance. This shift is inspired by the ways Black electronic dance musics transform sonic fragments into dynamic, processual soundscapes that resist rigid abstraction while embracing confluence and improvisation.

Rather than extracting discrete bits for representation, we will emphasize tuning into the rhythms and flows of events to discern patterns and possibilities obscured by conventional analysis. Through a deconstruction of prevailing methods for representing the past and present as numerical abstractions, we will undertake experiments resonant with the ethos of Black electronic dance musics, which take decontextualized histories and disparate sounds and (de/re)compose them into communal and immersive sonic experiences.

We will explore the break beats, blue notes, and ring shouts that drive collective sense-making among emcees, deejays, selectors, and dancers—not simply as aesthetic practices but as epistemic ones. Like these sonic forms, our inquiry will resist linear projections and causal chains, embracing instead rhythmic and resonant gestures as pathways for sense-making and the co-creation of emergent futures.

Break beats, blue notes, and ring shouts—the paradigmatic inventions of Afro-diasporic rhythmanalysts—are “abstract futurhythmachines.” The synthesizers and samplers with which Afro-diasporic rhythmanalysts generate break beats, blue notes, and ring shouts are “concrete futurhythmachines.” In theory, our focus today will be on the abstract rather than the concrete; in practice, however, we must tend to the concrete in order to articulate the abstract. Thus, we will be experimenting with samplers and synthesizers to generate break beats, blue notes, and ring shouts.

From Error to Errantry

On Anexactitude in Decolonial Science

The shift from data collection and analysis to sampling and synthesis signals a profound epistemic transformation: a movement from error to errantry. Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, describes errantry as a radical departure from totalizing systems of knowledge, emphasizing relationality, multiplicity, and the refusal of closure. This shift challenges the colonial fixation on control, mastery, and the reduction of complexity into extractable “truth.”

Colonial science is anchored in the dichotomy of “random error” (noise) and “systematic error” (bias). It presumes a stable, measurable reality where knowledge production depends on minimizing noise while biasing outcomes toward desired results. Consider the social scientist addressing recidivism rates: rather than asking what relational conditions produce cycles of incarceration, the question becomes how to intervene to bias reality toward lower recidivism. The world is framed as a field of variables to adjust, with success measured by the elimination of noise—the entanglements that disrupt clean causal claims. Bias is reduced to a technical flaw rather than a structuring principle of colonial knowledge itself.

This mode of experimentation is monometric: it imposes a single, synchronized measure of time and order where all variables align to a predetermined rhythm of control. It is symphonic, seeking harmonic unity under a dominant key, where discordance is corrected. And it is orchestrated, with knowledge production centralized under the authority of a composer-conductor, figures who define both the scope and limits of inquiry. The colonial scientist directs from above, seeking outcomes aligned with systems of power and capital.

Errantry unsettles this order. While colonial science is monometric, decolonial science is polymetric. Where colonial science is symphonic, decolonial science is polyphonic. Where colonial science is orchestrated, decolonial science is improvised—unfolding in confluence with the world, not as its master but as a participant in its infinite rhythms and relations.

The Break Beat

The break beat, central to Afro-diasporic musical traditions, challenges the monometric by embodying polymetricity—multiple, independent meters coexisting in tension without being subordinated to a single measure. John Miller Chernoff observes that African music “cannot be notated without assigning different measures to the different instruments in an ensemble.” This irreducible multiplicity generates vitality through rhythmic tension, not resolution.

The break beat’s power lies in its refusal of unifying standard measures. Each rhythm maintains its own measure in dynamic relationship with the others. The propulsiveness of the music emerges not from resolution but from the tension between overlapping measures, as listeners and players lose and find the beat across shifting temporalities. The break beat, a transversal that cuts across multiple measures, amplifies difference—it does not disrupt but articulates their entanglements.

Colonial science, by contrast, imposes a monometric logic. All variables must be synchronized to a unified/universal standard. Its goal is epistemic consensus, enforcing a single framework of intelligibility. Rhythmic tension—like epistemic variability—is treated as error, a failure to achieve coherence. Colonial science disciplines knowledge into alignment, endeavoring to resolve dissensus into consensus.

Decolonial science, through the paradigmatic vehicle of the break beat, refuses this flattening of difference. It honors the coexistence of multiple epistemic measures without collapsing them into a single overarching one. Knowledge here arises not from enforced order but from the generative tension between measures. To practice decolonial science is to remain present with this dissensus—to participate in the play of differing measures, where meaning emerges from a deference to difference rather than a resolution of difference.

The Blue Note

The blue note, with its expressive wavering and refusal of tonal accuracy and precision, challenges symphonic consonance by embodying spectral drift—polyphonic dissonances that begin elsewhere, bending towards and wavering around the note but refusing fixed resolution. It verges on the “off-key” while gesturing toward the “on-key,” defying the colonial musical ideal of perfect pitch.

Colonial science mirrors this obsession with accuracy and precision, dividing error into random error (noise) and systematic error (bias). Random error is seen as accidental deviation; systematic error, as a bias to be judged desirable or undesirable. Both assume that error must be corrected in the pursuit of truth.

The blue note unsettles this logic. It blurs the line between random and systematic, between accident and design. It does not assume there to be a target missed due to error but, rather, finds expressive tension in the manner of missing and drifting away from and around a target—opening new possibilities rather than closing them.

This is the errantry Glissant describes: not a failure to make one’s point but an affirmation of the significance of what is beside the point to the significance of the point itself. Where colonial science polices deviation, decolonial science embraces errantry as a condition of being in relation. To drift, to waver, to resist hitting the mark and sticking to the point is not a methodological failure but a way of being-in-the-world more ethically and more aesthetically.

The Ring Shout

The ring shout challenges the authority of the composer and conductor by way of a participatory structure where knowledge emerges relationally. In this Afro-diasporic practice, dancers, singers, and players move collectively in a circular formation. Call-and-response blurs the line between performer and audience. Knowledge arises not from fixed roles but through confluent exchanges of responsibility, losing one role and finding the other, again and again, time after time.

This challenges the colonial scientific paradigm of detached observation. The colonial observer stands apart as composer and conductor of experiments, rendering the world passive for analysis, while the ring shout collapses this distance. The observer/listener becomes the observed/player as participation deepens—drawn into the rhythm, responding to the call, becoming part of the music’s unfolding.

We have already noted how African music depends on the tension of losing and finding the beat and the note. In the ring shout, the observer/listener “completes” the music by becoming an observed/player, clapping, singing, and moving “on-key” and “on-beat” in response to leading calls from those already cast as observed/players who are “off-key” and “off-beat.” Sense-making is distributed, emergent, and shared.

The deeper one participates, however, the more errant one becomes, as one is tasked with playing “off-key” and “off-beat” in order to invite anyone who finds themselves in the role of observer/listener to make the transition into observed/player, clapping, singing, and moving “on-key” and “on-beat.” The fixed roles dissolve as each participant contributes polymetric and polyphonic variations, destabilizing the authority of a single voice. Mastery dissolves into confluence. Knowledge arises not from control but from the pulse of collective, unfolding relations.

Decolonial science mirrors this structure. It refuses the colonial fixation on mastering the object of knowledge. Instead, it recognizes that to know is to be in relation, where observer and observed blur into a shared pulse, pitch, and timbre of participation. Knowledge, like the rhythms of the ring shout, emerges from the confluence of relations—not imposed from above but co-created through call and response.

The Improvisation of Errant Relations

The break beat, the blue note, and the ring shout offer sonic paradigms for rethinking knowledge production beyond colonial control. The polymetric break beat resists the monometric, affirming the generativity of dissensus. The polyphonic blue note bends the boundaries of correctness, challenging the symphonic demand for harmonic unity. The improvised participatory antiphonies of the ring shout dissolve the authority of the composer and conductor, transforming knowledge into a participatory, call-and-response practice.

While colonial science seeks consensus, resolution, and mastery, decolonial science pulses with errantry—multiple measures in tension, voices in polyphonic dissonance, roles shifting in improvisatory confluences. This is not a rejection of structure but a refusal of epistemic enclosure—an affirmation that knowledge is relational, participatory, and always incomplete.

To practice decolonial science, then, is not merely to critique colonial paradigms but to engage differently with the rhythms of the world. It is to be part of the break, the drift, the call-and-response—to participate in the errant unfolding of knowledge as a living, breathing confluence of relations.

Workshop Part 1:

Make Some Noise

We begin by approaching numerical datasets as samples in wave-tables, transforming their discrete data points into digital signals or data streams through the construction of various wave-table oscillators. These signals will be used to “generate sound and organize time” using gen~ for Max/MSP/Jitter. While they can be shaped as audible signals, they may also serve as non-audible modulators, animating parameters of sonic processes—such as low-frequency oscillations, ramps, envelopes, steps, logic gates, triggers, and other dynamic control patterns. This phase emphasizes a shift from data extraction and analysis to signal sampling and synthesis, inspired by the break beat’s refusal of a singular pulse and the blue note’s spectral drift beyond fixed tonal accuracy.

Workshop Part 2:

Break the Beat

Building on Part 1, we will transform the ecological and economic data signals generated earlier into metrical rhythmachines, manipulating datasets to drive sequencers, drum machines, and beat slicers. This section explores metrical polyrhythm—the coexistence of multiple, non-synchronous meters—experimenting with the generative tension of the break beat. Rather than aligning to a single measure, the break beat’s power lies in its refusal to resolve rhythmic tension, creating a dynamic interplay between losing and finding the beat. Participants will work with overlapping cycles and conflicting meters, engaging rhythm as a site of dissensus where meaning arises not from synchronization but from the friction of difference.

Workshop Part 3

Drift into the Blue

Extending the sonic principles explored in Parts 1 and 2, we will reconfigure the same data signals as spectral rhythmachines, filtering and modulating the envelopes of sampled and synthesized audio. By introducing microtonal variations and glissando effects, participants will explore spectral drift—where sonic elements waver around a tonal center without collapsing into harmonic resolution. This practice mirrors the expressive uncertainty of the blue note, which challenges fixed tonal precision through its off-key wavering, inviting listeners to both lose and find the note. Just as the break beat destabilizes rhythmic certainty, the blue note bends harmonic boundaries, offering a model of errantry—knowledge in motion, expressive rather than corrective.

Workshop Part 4:

Enter the Cypher

We conclude with collective sonic improvisation and relational sense-making through participatory call-and-response. Forming a physical circle, participants will work with the data streams from previous sessions, selecting one dataset to act as a rhythmic “caller”—a looping signal derived from ecological or economic data. This phase explores the relational dynamics of the ring shout, where shifting roles between caller and responder dissolve the separation between performer and audience. Participants will respond with rhythmic, harmonic, and textural interventions (drum loops, voices, instruments), rotating roles where the caller becomes the responder and vice versa.

As in the ring shout, the process of losing and finding the beat, the note, and the role becomes central: performers and listeners mutually participate in co-creating the pulse and timbre. Just as the break beat emphasizes polymetric dissensus and the blue note invites spectral drift, the ring shout foregrounds participatory improvisation—each contribution entangled in an emergent collective rhythm.

This final phase brings together the workshop’s core epistemic insights: data as a living signal, rhythm as dissensus, polyphony as harmonic drift, and collective improvisation as participatory sense-making. Through this recursive call-and-response, we resist the colonial demand for consensus and closure, embracing instead the dynamic unfolding of knowledge through relational difference.