Oud

The sweet strings vibrate into a shimmering array of sound that swims through the air like a golden fish flying above the clouds in the rays of a bright golden sun. Seconds turn into hours as your once restless soul settles down within the sweet still embrace of this enchanting and ancient instrument. The oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in North Africa and Middle Eastern music. According to Farabi, the oud was invented by Lamech, the sixth grandson of Adam. The legend tells that the grieving Lamech hung the body of his dead son from a tree. The first oud was inspired by the shape of his son's bleached skeleton. The oldest pictorial record of a lute dates back to the Uruk period in Southern Mesopotamia (modern Nasiriyah city), over 5000 years ago on a cylinder seal. The image depicts a female crouching with her instruments upon a boat, playing right-handed. This instrument appears many times throughout Mesopotamian history and again in ancient Egypt from the 18th dynasty onwards in long and short-neck varieties. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=115399