AHMED MUIN ABU AMSHA – Meet the Gaza music teacher behind viral drone song

When children complained about the oppressive drone noise, he told them, “No, we have to sing with it.” He encouraged them to use the drone as an auditory pitch, matching its tone with guitar notes, and transforming it into a melodic accompaniment.

A music teacher in Gaza has transformed the sound of Israeli drones into a powerful song honouring those killed in Israel’s genocide. Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha uses music to help displaced and traumatised Palestinian children cope amid war and devastation.

Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha—also known simply as Ahmed Abu Amsha—is a musician, composer, sound engineer, and music educator from Gaza City. Before the war, he taught music at both the American School of Gaza and the Edward Said Conservatory of Music, and ran a professional recording studio called Awtar for Sound Production.

In a bold act of resistance, Abu Amsha uses the constant, ominous buzz of Israeli drones—known locally as “zanana” (“buzzing sound”)—as a musical tool. When children complained about the oppressive drone noise, he told them, “No, we have to sing with it.” He encouraged them to use the drone as an auditory pitch, matching its tone with guitar notes, and transforming it into a melodic accompaniment.

As described on Medium, this audacious reframing turns an instrument of fear into a “harmonic heartbeat of music,” bringing solace and defiance together in the voices of those children.

Despite being displaced at least 12 times since the war began, Abu Amsha continues to perform, teach, and inspire children in tents, shelters, and even among rubble. Each time his family had nowhere to go, they carried their instruments with them—because to them, these were lifelines.

He founded Gaza Birds Singing (GBS), an ensemble of displaced children and local music teachers who share songs of life, freedom, and dignity. Their music serves as a beacon of humanity amid destruction. Reuters reported that Ahmed, a guitar and violin teacher distinguished by his “broad smile,” was among the first to restart music lessons amid displacement—playing guitar in evening sessions under tents in southern Gaza.

DRONE MUSIC

In Indian classical music, the drone is usually provided by the tanpura or sometimes by a harmonium or shruti box. It’s a sustained sonic bed, a constant tonal reference point against which the raga unfolds. The drone isn’t melody itself but a ground, a pulse of being. It gives orientation, mood, and resonance—almost like the axis of a world. It has an ancient spiritual function, too: symbolizing permanence, the eternal Om beneath all fluctuations of melody and rhythm.

In the case of the flying device, the word “drone” originally described the male honeybee, which makes a low, monotonous buzzing sound. Early pilotless aircraft, when they appeared in the 20th century, made a similar buzzing noise—hence the nickname drone. Over time, that word stuck and expanded to encompass the whole category of unmanned aerial vehicles.

The connection, then, is sonic. Both meanings converge on that sense of a continuous hum: in one case, the supportive hum of a musical foundation; in the other, the oppressive hum of a machine of surveillance or war. One is grounding and liberating; the other can be suffocating and terrifying. And this is precisely what makes Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha’s gesture so poignant: he reclaims the sound of the military drone—the “zanana”—and reframes it musically, almost as if returning it to its primordial sense of “drone” as harmonic resonance.