Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh born March 4, 1921 is an Egyptian-American composer, performer, ethnomusicologist, and educator, who has had a career spanning six decades. He is particularly known as an early pioneer of electronic music, for having composed in 1944 the first piece of electronic tape music, a student at Cairo, Egypt.Using a method later known as musique concrete, he captured the sounds of an ancient zaar ceremony and electronically manipulated those sounds to create a piece of tape music called The Expression of Zaar, presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo. While his initial experiments in electronic tape music were not widely known outside of Egypt at the time, El-Dabh would eventually gain more fame for his influential work in electronic music at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music centre in the late 1950 to early 1960s.