Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh

Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017) was an Egyptian-American composer, ethnomusicologist, and educator whose career spanned six decades. In 1944, while a student in Cairo, he used a wire recorder to manipulate a recording of a Zaar exorcism ceremony, creating The Expression of Zaar — one of the earliest known works of tape music, predating Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète experiments by four years.

From the late 1950s he worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center alongside Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, later teaching for decades at Kent State University. He is now recognised as foundational to the early history of electronic music.