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.



sizhuScape


April - May 2025
Design/Audio Project:


Papers:
Proposal Presentation
Final Presentation
Digital Model (p5) Project

Some stuff I ‘exemplified’:

p5.js
Reaper
User-End Instrument Construction
Architectural Design Composition
Stakeholder Presentation

An experiential team project that worked to produce a prototyped space for a public, interactive traditional Chinese music experience. This project was devised through Jiangnan regional historical research, music interactivity techniques, and real user-data, for a final presentation to team members of the town’s revitalization office, Shui On Land.


As part of my class in NYU Shanghai, “Experience Studio: Activating the City,” our group’s main goal was to devise a public intervention that retained cultural and interpersonal engagement within public spaces. Notably, we were able to work personally with a town currently being revitalized in Shanghai, Panlong Tiandi. Out of pure passion for audio, our group leaned closer toward a music-based interaction, and eventually landed on a more modern approach to the Jiangnan region’s classical Sizhu ensemble music.

Our first approach was to gather as much interview information from Panlong Tiandi residents and visitors, as well as any information we can get about learning and playing instruments from fellow college instrumentalist students. Along the way of both interviewing, ideating, and prototyping, we learned much about creating a strong balance between usability and discoverability, but also practicality and authenticity!

I eventually worked more on the digital model side, while we all contributed toward the physical model as well. Our digital model was a p5.js project, in which I gathered clean audio of specific ensemble instruments, transposed them along a pentatonic scale, and then laid them out in a contemporary form that we were looking for. The interaction is linked below! Overall, the project taught much about how projects geared towards public users should ultimately let users, visitors, and stakeholders speak way more than the idea itself.

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