Idris Al-Wazani
(ih-Drees Al-wuh-Zah-nee)


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I’m an aspiring audio/design technologist majoring in Electrical Engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. I design hardware, frontend software, real-time technology, lighting, visuals, and sound for the world of live performance, art, and public spaces in order to make people’s time anywhere meaningful. Feel free to view my work on this site.






Currently obsessed with:

 Embedded Systems, HPF/LPF Circuit Design, TouchDesigner, Ableton Live, Drum Machine Analog Circuits, Complextro, GrandMA3, Electric Energy Conversion,






As a third-year Electrical Engineering major with a minor in Integrated Design & Media (focusing on audio technology), I have had a huge interest in audio design and engineering during my lifetime, and am actively combining my major and minor to accommodate for that vision. Alongside my deep passion for music and music culture, I would love to work as an audio engineer for live performances, broadcasts, or anything that involves an audience in the future! I was born in Austin, Texas from a Belgian mother and Palestinian father. Since the age of five, I have moved to Singapore, Atlanta, Shanghai, Seoul, and now am a passionate resident of New York City.

When I was young, I often engaged in film, whether it be through attending summer film camps, or small daily iMovies on my iPad. Despite the frequent storytelling that went into these amateur films, I was most deeply in love with the science behind the audio and video that went into making films. In my mind, I found it necessary to understand how exactly these microphones, cameras, and A/V systems worked on the micro level to finally be able to apply myself the way I wanted to. It wasn’t until I joined school theater in 2018 that I fully realized my passion for A/V. After acting for a few semesters, I eventually understood that I was set in my ways of working for the A/V crew, as well as stage managing for a few productions. My passion for STEM in school eventually brought me to study engineering in college here at NYU Tandon, and I am now a major in electrical engineering. I have an extremely profound and focused interest in the electronics behind concepts we know of nowadays, and I find it even more fascinating to apply myself to audio.

For the time being, I’m currently working on many smaller-scale projects involving interactive audio technology. Many of these projects and skills have also built me up to recently become comfortable behind the audio engineering and mastering of certain music and film projects in college. My principal motivating goal, and one of my philosophical interests, is to be able to fulfill a role in which society can be geared towards urbanizing in an equitable clean, future-conscious, and entertaining way. I hope my work – for the rest of my life – continues to fulfill this goal.

I spend most of my time on the Tandon campus socializing and working with my friends and coworkers at the NYU MakerSpace. My personal passions are a little further from the technical engineering side, since I spend most of my free time skateboarding, DJing/hosting events, and producing electronic music.



AirDJ/AirSynth


April - May 2025
Programming/Music Project:



Papers:
Mini Research Paper

Some stuff I ‘exemplified’:

Computer Vision
Machine Learning
TouchDesigner
VCV Rack (Virtual Synthesizing)
Vision Detection Implementation
Python (Google Colab)

A MediaPipe, TouchDesigner, and VCV-Rack based pipeline I developed that allows users to control any synthesizer patch or emulate a Pioneer DJ controller using just their hands and facial movements.


As part of my Computer Vision class, I spent most of the semester learning about vision fundamentals: neural networks, convolutional networks, architectures, detection, segmentation, autoencoders, etc…

I wanted my final project to apply facial and hand recognition in a way that can affect live audio performance. In turn, I dove deep into all new types of software and programming I was completely unfamiliar with. With a few weeks of preliminary research – understanding TouchDesigner basics, knowing what exactly MediaPipe can do as a computer vision software, and gathering lots of survey data on what feels most natural when trying to control sound with movement – I was able to start my process on this toolkit.

I spent some more weeks on the actual development of programming MediaPipe calculations in TouchDesigner, developing VCV Rack synth patches from scratch, and letting the two communicate through Open Sound Control (OSC). The result was a super cool experience and mesmerizing! All the technicals – including a mini experiment using a custom-programmed YOLOv8 hand detection model as a comprehensive exercise for MediaPipe’s purpose – were written in my mini-paper for the project as well (attached to the left!).