Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion formed through historically uneven entanglements of African diasporic cosmologies, indigenous epistemologies, and Euro-Christian spiritist frameworks, unfolds ritually in the terreiro - the communal space where mediumship, drumming, and pontos cantados (sung chants) organize sacred interaction. In this setting, sound is not symbolic accompaniment, but the very constitutive of presence. Taking this claim seriously, however, requires rethinking how ethnomusicology has theorized ritual sound. The field has moved beyond representational models toward embodiment and participation (Friedson 1996; Csordas 1994), yet music is still often treated as experiential grounding rather than ontological practice. Drawing on long-term lived experience as both ritual singer and medium in Southern Brazil, I argue that, in Umbanda ritual life, listening does not simply decode meaning but organizes the relational conditions under which sacred presence becomes possible. Building on Nancy’s (2007) listening as resonance and Ingold’s (2011) dwelling as relational practice, I conceptualize Umbanda ritual music as an embodied sound practice in which pontos cantados do not merely represent entities but call, sustain, redirect, and withhold presence. In a historically unequal “triple heritage” (Freyre 1933/2003; Prandi 1996; Flor do Nascimento 2017), sacred presence depends on cultivated openness and relational discernment. By reframing ritual listening as ontological practice rather than expressive medium, this paper intervenes in debates on music and world-making, Afro-diasporic sacred arts, and the ontological turn in ethnomusicology. Here, listening is a mode of being-with through which living and spiritual presences come into relation.