Sol Maris Trinidad (Project Staff) is an ethnomusicologist, arts manager, and cultural worker. She completed her Bachelor of Music in Musicology from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Music. She was a member of the UP Rondalla, where she played bandurria, and a Founding Member of the UP Tugtugang Musika Asyatika (TUGMA). With them, she has travelled as a performer and stage manager in the Philippines, China, and Thailand. Among her research areas are Cebuano church music, dalit (sung prayers), and band music of the Tagalog, traditional music from the islands of Panay and Mindanao in the Philippines, and choral music management of the Philippines. She has presented papers on these in the Philippines, Thailand, and Italy, and has been published in the bi-annual arts and ideas magazine, International Gallerie. Sol oversees fiscal management of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Musicology at UP Diliman.
Jay Yamomo (Project Staff) is a cultural futures curator, art critic, manager, and historian whose work bridges community archiving, sound studies, and futures literacy with organizational and social transformation. As Project Convenor of the I-ALPHA-HL movement, Managing Director of The Inteligente Publishing, Inc., and Grant and Community Outreach Specialist at Sonic Entanglements, his practice is shaped by collaborations with international cultural institutions and grounded partnerships with government agencies and communities in the Philippines. Through the co-development of community-authored learning materials and heritage initiatives, he advances an educational approach that enables communities to imagine and shape their own futures—one that begins from lived experience, nurtures multiple ways of thinking, and gradually forms shared directions through dialogue and practice. Drawing on extensive professional experience in executive training, customer service, property and construction management, heritage development, and business operations, his work foregrounds barangay-based epistemologies, decolonial memory, and performative learning as foundations for building culturally rooted, self-determining, and globally prepared communities.
meLê yamomo (Founder) composes with time itself—stretching, layering, and bending it into new sonic landscapes. His work is not simply about sound, but about the ghosts that inhabit it, the histories it carries, and the futures it dares to imagine. Born in the currents of migration, his life has unfolded across Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, Munich, and now between Amsterdam and Berlin. He leads the research projects Sonic Entanglements, funded by the Dutch Research Organization (NWO), and Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives, under the European Joint Programming Initiative Cultural Heritage (JPICH).
In recognition of his contributions, meLê received the Open Ear Award, a prestigious composer prize in the Netherlands, and was honored with the 2020 Early Career Award by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tawid, a grant program founded through his 2020 KNAW Early Career Award, supports community-led sound archival research in Southeast Asia. His work dissolves the boundary between scholarship and artistic practice so closely that “it is hard to hear where one begins and the other ends” (2022 Open Ear Composer Prize Jury Report). As artist-scholar, yamomo develops expanded compositional and listening practices that imagine decolonial futures.