This track is a remix of Mariem Hassan's "Haiyu" and Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You." In the hopes of making Mariem's music accessible to a new generation of listeners, I created this track as the final project for a class on African Music and African Politics. I hope you enjoy, and below is a description of my process in creating this track.

When I was first thinking of a song to match with “Haiyu,” I realized that its chords were similar to Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” and that I could chop up the audio recording of “Haiyu” so that the vocals would be more prominent, and the guitar solos in between would be less so. I first equalized “Haiyu” so that the background music would have little to no sound. Then, using Audacity (another music program), I lowered the BPM of Haiyu so that it would match the BPM of “Shape of You.” I downloaded an instrumental version of “Shape of You” and made it the main track on Logic Pro X so that it would be the base of the remix as a whole. For the beginning of the remix, I faded the beginning guitar solo of “Haiyu” into “Shape of You” by switching around the volumes and equalizations. I then matched the entrance of Mariem’s vocals to when Ed Sheeran would have entered the song – this was more difficult because Mariem did not keep a constant BPM - something I was more used to having heard popular Western music. Finally, after adding some final blending elements to the song, my new remix, “Shape of Haiyu,” was complete.

Edward.J.Campbell

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