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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong
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Writing words that work for this is going to be really hard. Have you considered finding an appropriate instrumental tune - instrumental in the musical sense, not the philosophical sense - and just having everyone wordlessly sing to it? Until a candle goes out, perhaps? For Ravenclaws, words call forth possible objections. Singing is just singing.
This could be fixed by singing in a language people are unfamiliar with. I think wordful singing, even in a language I don't know, is qualitatively different from wordless singing in a nice way.
A Elbereth Gilthoniël
silivren penna míriël
o menel aglar elenath!
was the first thing that came to mind. But there's also Hymnos, a conlang designed expressly for ritually singing about one's emotions to a continent-sized magical computer, which seems even more apropos somehow.
And Yuki Kajiura has got a lot of mileage out of nonsense syllables :)