The RPM Voices, with singers from more than 25 community and church choirs in Providence and the area, will perform twice on Sunday at the Providence Black Repertory Company.

The week-long SoundSession festival is the best party Providence throws, and it starts in downtown Providence on Sunday with a gospel brunch featuring the RPM Voices, a choir led by Brown University Africana Studies professor Clarice Thompson and showcasing singers from the city and the area.

The choir that will perform at the Providence Black Repertory Company is the culmination of a six-day choral music workshop that attracts a group of people from all over the community.

Thompson, a musicologist, began the workshops in 2003 at the behest of some of her students who wanted to take vocal lessons with her. “I’m a people person,” Thompson says, “so I wanted it not to just be about students, but anyone who wanted to join with us.” The idea was for singers to learn the rudiments of choir singing, and to get exposure to new material, which those singers who were members of other choirs could then pass on to their home groups.

RPM stands for Research-to-Performance Method, a method pioneered by George Houston Bass and Brett S. Jones that entails researching a topic and “taking someone’s thesis paper and putting it on stage,” Thompson says. “Taking that whole process and opening it up to the public, and having a conversation about it.”

She does some academic teaching in the workshop, describing the music and its origins, she says. “I named the choir after that, but going forward . . . it doesn’t have to be strictly identified, because we have become more than that.”

Performing wasn’t part of the plan back then, Thompson says, but at the end of the first workshop, she says she told them, “You guys have done some great work; someone should hear this besides me.” She started looking around the building at Brown and found some people at a conference to bring up and listen to the group. “And I realized — we have to cap off the workshop that way.”

This is the seventh year for the RPM workshops, and while they’ve been at SoundSession since 2007, this year they’re doing several other performances — at the Providence Fourth of July celebration, in Burnside Park July 8 at noon, and at the Dexter Training Ground at 6 p.m. on July 9.

The ethic of community and inclusiveness that Thompson wanted in 2003 is still alive today. “My choir members represent more than 25 community and church choirs,” she says, including various Providence churches as well as members of the Providence Singers, the Shape-Note Singers, the Exalt Choir and more. “I have singers who are members of Temple Emanu-El. And they’re coming to sing gospel . . . and they love it.”

That ecumenical approach governs the music, too. As an undergraduate, Thompson went to Lane College, in Jackson, Tenn., and her professor there was “very meticulous about mixing up types of music — anthems, art songs, spirituals, gospels.” And she does the same, explaining that about 60 percent of the group’s repertoire is from the gospel and spiritual musical canon, and the rest is outside that. She’s starting to look into the music of other cultures as well, and planning a holiday show, too.

“I do like to pick stuff that people don’t necessarily hear all the time.” Part of that is regional; she can take songs that are well known in Oklahoma or Texas or Tennessee, and it’s fresh to Rhode Island ears.

“I’m just looking for good music. Something that sounds good and something that’s achievable. I want people to walk out thinking, ‘I got through that piece, but I was challenged.’ ”

Donald W. King, artistic director of the Black Rep, says that there’s been a gospel brunch at all SoundSession festivals except the first one (which only ran Thursday through Saturday). He says that the idea is “to start the festival off on a spiritual note. I wanted to find a way to bless the festival, and bring something a little more serene.”

“We go from the sacred to the profane in seven days,” King says, adding with a laugh, “Nobody’s supposed to know that it’s a ritual disguised as a music festival!”

The festival actually starts with a prayer service on South Main Street from 7 to 10 a.m. on Sunday (attendees are asked to wear white clothes and to bring an offering). Then they walk over to the Black Rep to start the brunch.

King, who met Thompson when he was an undergraduate at Brown and who now teaches in the Africana Studies department, says the brunch draws “a mixture of people who go to church and people who appreciate the music on a cultural level.”

He says that the singers and attendees “comment that they’ve never been in such a situation, with such big crowds, and felt it so spiritual and warm.”

Thompson agrees. She said that this year she talked to the group about doing the brunch somewhere besides the Black Rep, but she was shouted down. “There’s something very spiritual about being in that space.”

King says the brunch gets the festival off on the right foot — with a feeling of communal togetherness. “My term is always ‘One nation under a groove,’ . . . and my goal has always been to bring all different people together.”

The RPM Gospel Brunch will be held at the Providence Black Repertory Company, 276 Washington St., Sunday at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tickets are $25; call (401) 351-0353.

rmassimo@projo.com