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Odile Marchetti: This is The Long Vowel. I'm Odile Marchetti.

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Teodor Halvorsen: I'm Teodor Halvorsen. Our guest works behind the music: Bassel Kanaan, a concert sound engineer in Amman. Bassel, your word.

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Bassel Kanaan: Tarab. It's the feeling music gives you when it really reaches you. Joy, but heavier. A kind of enchantment.

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Odile Marchetti: Is it the music or the feeling?

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Bassel Kanaan: Both. We say a singer is a mutrib, the one who brings tarab. And there is even music called tarab music: the old, long songs.

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Teodor Halvorsen: What does it look like from the outside?

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Bassel Kanaan: People close their eyes. They lean forward. Somebody calls out, Allah, or Ya salam, in the middle of a phrase. In a classical concert in Europe that would be rude. For us, that's the sign it is working.

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Odile Marchetti: So the audience is part of it.

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Bassel Kanaan: The audience is half of it. The singer repeats a line because the room asks for it. Ten times, maybe, and each time a little different. The song gets longer because the people want to stay inside it.

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Teodor Halvorsen: Can anybody feel tarab?

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Bassel Kanaan: Anyone can, but there are listeners who know where it's coming. We call them sammi'a, the ones who listen well. They hear the turn in the melody one second early, they react, and the singer feels them react. It goes round in a circle.

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Odile Marchetti: Like a conversation.

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Bassel Kanaan: Exactly a conversation. Sometimes with no words in it at all.

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Teodor Halvorsen: And you are at the mixing desk at the back.

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Bassel Kanaan: Yes, and my job is strange. For tarab, I must not make it perfect. If I cut the noise of the audience, I cut the tarab. So I leave their voices in: the applause in the wrong place, the calls. That is the recording.

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Odile Marchetti: Bassel Kanaan, thank you.

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Teodor Halvorsen: That was tarab. Next time, a word from Korean about reading a room.