# Lesson Plan: MUSIC 30 Halim el-Dabh ## Goals 1) Teach students the basics of audio editing/manipulation. 2) Allow them to begin to recognize some of the digital techniques they are hearing in the music they are studying in the course. ## Activities 1) Warm-up activity: Previous experience with audio editing. What is fidelity? High vs. low fidelity? What can make "low fidelity" pieces special or in some way "more real/true"? *copies of copies *lo-fi hip-hop, etc. 3) Brief discussion of Halim el-Dabh's "Wire Recorder Piece" which they have listened to/discussed in class -- an attempt to describe the manipulation of the sound, and a review of el-Dabh's techniques. We will listen through to it and describe any reactions -- trying to put words to describe what you are hearing and how el-Dabh has dealt with the sounds. Discussion of Egyptian *zar* tradition and play recent track -- significance of the tradition, but el-Dabh was trying to capture about it. Play brief video clip. Our plan: to recreate "Wire recorder piece" Two things to acknowledge here: #1: we will be manipulating it without a full understanding of the significance and experience of *zar* but hopefully will understand something about the power of audio manipulation and el-Dabh's vision. #2: el-Dabh was working with wire recorder, a starting point of low fidelity. However, we now have the ability to apply these techniques with the click of a few buttons! 3. Introduction to Audacity, basic navigation 4. The challenge: Students are given "Abdelsalam Lamsar", a track from Mazaher's *Zar* album. They will attempt to manipulate the sound to create something that sounds close to el-Dabh's piece. This will involve: - Basics of Audacity: - Splitting and trimming - Moving to different track levels, using track and master volume etc. - Fading in and out - Echo - Reverb (and doing this multiple times) - a mini share-out at this point - EQ/discussion of frequency curves - ability to look at spectrogram form, but this will not be our focus right now. - I play the original track in GarageBand (preview of the platform for next week) and show them the live "analyzer" on the frequency curve. What seem to be the fundamental notes, and what seems to be "noise"? 5. Finally, we share out what we created and reflect on the artistic possibilities of this kind of manipulation.