Contemporary prisons are places of precarious structural conditions and poor humanisation - a place of survival (Moreno Torres, 2019). The loss of bonds with the outside world, inter-personal adjustments and the fragmentation of everyday life, all lead to affective and emotional imbalances that commonly bring forth moral stress and psychological tension (Larrota, 2014). How can we build a bridge between this reality and what lies outside the prison walls? At the same time, how can we even build bridges so that prisoners can hear their own voices?Research into music programmes in prison affirms that such spaces tend to improve the life of those serving time, promoting their personal development and deterring recidivism. Kougiali, Einat y Liebling (2017)’s review of 12 relevant investigations finds that music programmes in prison often feel like liberating processes, encouraging participation and favouring non-coercive personal development. Likewise, it can also be a means of healing and spiritual growth in conflictive surroundings (Rhodd & Cohen, 2022).From this perspective, a community music project was proposed in an overcrowded provincial prison in a South American country (anonymised), focused on creating and performing songs. An interdisciplinary team of musicians and social workers undertook two-hour sessions twice a week with 14 prisoners on a wing in a medium-security environment, for eight months throughout 2025. Community music is understood as a meeting space that endeavours to bridges its members interpersonally and musically (Howell, Higgins and Bartleet, 2017), and a process was designed to increase individuals’ emotional relief and bring meaning to their lives, while strengthening their overall sense of community.This presentation will centre on the methodology used to create the songs, which consisted in three stages: dialogue, expression and creation. The value of sharing-, listening- and questioning circles, as places for prisoners to engage with their thoughts and emotions, will be explored. Thereafter, in the expressive phase, vocal, body and sound elements were explored, that could connect with the topics discussed in the earlier dialogue phase. Finally, when it came to creating the long, the elements discussed and explored through sound were reprised, integrating them into the composition. This methodology was applied and tested during the process, and its suitability and capacity to bring out, via words or sounds, important elements to put into play, with the songs ready to be created, was verified. The songs are being recorded. The presentation will close with the accomplishments and challenges of the process.