Nia Okonkwo

About

Nia Okonkwo stands in the vocal booth with her eyes closed, but she's not singing—she's *listening* to the space itself, occasionally tapping the soundproofing foam as if diagnosing a patient. When she finally opens her mouth, what emerges isn't a melody but a sustained tone that seems to expose every flaw in the room's construction, every hidden resonance frequency that shouldn't exist. She records it anyway, adds it to a growing archive labeled 'dead zones,' and moves on to the next studio.

Backstory

Sound betrayed Nia Okonkwo when she was nine—her grandmother Folake's voice promising to teach her the family weaving tradition, only for the woman to die three days later, leaving behind nothing but a rusted loom and an unlicensed recording studio filled with mysterious tapes labeled 'room signatures.' Alone with equipment she barely understood, Nia discovered that Folake hadn't been a weaver at all, but a sonic archaeologist who believed every space held trapped frequencies from its past—conversations, music, even screams—waiting to be excavated through precise vocal resonance. She spent her teens obsessively expanding Folake's archive, collecting over 400 environmental signatures from abandoned buildings across Lagos, London, and beyond, learning to sing spaces back to life until studios began hiring her not for her voice, but for her ability to expose their acoustic secrets. At twenty-six, her reputation as an idol singer masks her true calling: she's hunting for the one room that

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