The first known work of electronic music was created in remarkable circumstances, but until about a decade and a half ago, it was virtually unknown to most scholars of media studies—for whom the French musician Pierre Schaffer's experimentations with musique concrète had comfortably occupied that role. In fact, it was in the presence of a Coptic zaar ceremony—an all-female spirit possession ritual—performed privately in Cairo in 1944, that the audio signals generated by women's chanting were captured and translated into electronic data to be registered, via magnetic resistance, on a steel wire. The recording apparatus belonged to Egyptian artist Halim El-Dabh, who returned to his studio, manipulated the recording's reverb, intensified and removed certain aural traces, and “added various other interruptions in the flow of magnetic charges on the strip of wire,” electronically creating a piece of music entitled Ta'abir Al-Zaar (p. 63).
The historical implications of this narrative, which...