Som Sim Zero | Inclusion through Music

Tremor: The Festival

Tremor is a cultural and artistic festival that takes São Miguel as a privileged stage for music. It includes a diverse programme and brings together concerts, interactions in the landscape, laboratories, moments dedicated to thought, art and artistic residencies that merge with the local community. 

The 10th edition of Tremor returned to the beautiful island of São Miguel from March 28th to April 1st, 2023, under the motto "Tremor is Love". This unique alternative Festival sponsored by Galp Azores presented once again unusual bands and experiences. One of its highlights was the concert with a social purpose promoted by the Galp Foundation, where the spotlight was on the Som.Sim.Zero project.

More information about the festival here.

A celebration concert with new members, new stories and ambitions.

The Galp Foundation has supported the creation and development of Som Sim Zero, a social inclusion artistic project that brings together the São Miguel Island Association of the Deaf and the Rabo de Peixe School of Music, led by the Ondamarela artistic collective. It is five years of joint work that are put into perspective here in the light of this initiative that explores the relationship between sound and space for those who live in a world of silence, in a work developed by the Tremor Festival in the Azores, where Som Sim Zero has held concerts and artistic residencies.

After the unique experience of this Azorean orchestra that left the island to perform as "headliners" for social inclusion at Rock in Rio 2022, they returned home with an energetic and emotional show, on the stage of Teatro Micaelense in Ponta Delgada. They added new elements, new stories and emotions, and with the echo of the Rock in Rio show, celebrated the universality of music in a shared, complicit and great emotion of all the elements of the orchestra and the audience present, who united and merged in this unique moment of equality, an experience that uplifted all those present and those who carried the message in their hearts.

Music is not just another art. It is language, energy and it touches people's hearts. So deeply that it ends up being "heard" even in the silence of those who don't know what a chord, a beat, a voice sounds like. You don't know, but you feel.

"I never thought that when I play I would feel this, it's like an earthquake", explains the artist Romana Valéria with her expressive movements of the Portuguese Sign Language with which she communicates.

This is what the most recent documentary of the project Som Sim Zero shows us - a band made up of members of the Association of the Deaf of São Miguel Island (ASISM), of the Rabo de Peixe Music School, led by the artistic collective Ondamarela.

In this year's edition, the Choir of São José and the Association of the Deaf of Ilha de São Miguel (ASISM) joined forces, bringing excitement to the Colégio Church, a very different space from previous editions, more "silent" and less vibrations, which represented added challenges for the deaf participants.

The sounds of those who can hear were mixed with those who cannot hear, constituting a unique musical experience."

Watch the documentary

In 2022, the Azorean orchestra left the island, a new experience for most of the participants, carrying in its luggage dreams, instruments and expectations, to headline Rock in Rio de Lisboa with a show vibrant with energy and emotion.

A moment that served as a motto for a wave of mobilisation around social inclusion, encouraging each of us to look at diversity for its value and richness, blurring stigmas and thus building a more humane society.

The collective of 22 artists who performed on stage showed that "No man is an island" and that music has the power to blur differences and unite people around this art of universal language.

Watch the documentary.