You can hear them before you can see them. Drums pounding proudly through favela streets, inviting you in.
They're quite a sight when finally encountered - brightly coloured makeshift drums constructed from barrels and plastic containers.
The beating is the sound of Afro Reggae, an NGO percussion, dance and drama school, run from one of Rio's poorest neighbourhoods, Vigario Geral.
We had to be escorted in of course, foreigners can't just walk into a favela, let alone a camera crew. Our contact had to first alert the drug dealers that we would be coming and filming, and in which particular streets.
They were also informed when we went to film vision from the bridge and alerted again, when we were leaving.
In this favela, they deal marijuana and cocaine but they have a rule against crack. If anyone living in Vigario Geral is caught using it, they're evicted. This social structure is not uncommon in Brazil's slums.
Understanding it, is another thing. But Afro Reggae, does understand it.
The school has been based in the favela for 20 years. The cultural group moved in to this neighbourhood and began classes in 1993, just after the massacre of 21 people apparently by off-duty police officers. No one has been convicted.
Though such a horrific incident of this magnitude hasn't been repeated here again, there's always a threat, and Afro Reggae is working hard to rule it out completely.
It's aim here is to break the barriers between life in favelas and life in cities, using music to command the attention of its students.
It's deliberately flashy, competing with the drug gangs to lure the youth to their side. It had courted some controversy because of this and the wrath of drug dealers themselves, who have reportedly vandalised the centres.
What we've come to see here is the transformation some of these kids have made. Watching Afro Reggae teachers and students perform is electric. They are so involved, so full of joy and so far removed from the dangerous reality that completely surrounds them.
There's six of these culture centres throughout Rio, educating about 200 students. The teachers at Afro Reggae say the students who they work with, have been "saved".
Recently, the group has been forced to close the centres in two of Rio's most violent favelas, because the ongoing confrontations between pacification police and drug gangs has made it too dangerous to operate.
There's no pacification police in Vigario Geral, but Afro Reggae believes it plays that role better anyway. Their ideology is "bringing hope to the hopeless", something which isn't always easy, in a country like Brazil.
