“Eight History-Making Musical Inventions” Online Lecture Series【Online Programme】

Without these inventions, we would not have the kinds of music we know today.  Not many people know about their inventors, and they are not discussed in detail in the history books.  Yet every one of these inventions changed the course of music in its development.  Dennis Wu will take music lovers back in time to find out how these inventors, much less well-known than the composers, wrote important pages for music.  

Conducted in Cantonese.

The programme does not represent the views of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.  The presenter reserves the right to vary the broadcast time of the lectures.

Dennis Wu is an active music critic, composer and recording producer, having hosted and produced numerous programmes on Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) Radio 4.  He is a sought-after speaker for music talks, student concerts and workshops.  In 2013, he curated the concert Yu Kwang-chung’s Words and Music, in it he was the narrator of Yu's poem and composer of Fire of Rebirth.  He is  Associate Marketing Director for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, specialised in digital marketing and promotion.

Before printing was invented, sheet music was either woodblock-printed or copied by hand.  Until the 15^th century, Ottaviano Petrucci, a Venetian printer, invented a movable type for sheet music.  Not only did he turn Venice into a distribution hub for sheet music, but also lead to the rise of non-religious music.

A designer altered the way the hammers struck inside a harpsichord and changed it into a pianoforte with the dynamics of forte and piano,  which became a household musical instrument.

Children practising the piano have a love-hate relationship with a Metronome.  Yet, why was Beethoven putting so much attention to this invention which is not musical at all?  Not only did the metronome witness the change of the times, it also changed humankind’s concepts about music or even time.

Before the 19th century, concert halls and opera houses in Europe were built after the styles of palaces to provide convenience for socialising among the aristocrats.  However, there was one composer held that his works were not for socialising and custom-built a new concert hall to allow concertgoers to focus and appreciate his operas which gradually became the model of all modern concert halls.

In the past, if you wanted to listen to music, you could either sing or play a musical instrument.  With the emergence of the phonograph, it changed radically the way we listened to music.

Sound can be broken down into sound waves in physical terms.  If one can come to grips with the principles governing the changes of sound waves, it can generate sounds of infinite possibilities.  With the development of oscillator, 20th century music is not necessarily produced by a musical instrument anymore, instead, a basic audio oscillator will do.

Before the advent of Walkman, recorded music could be played on cumbersome machines and could only be enjoyed at home.  With the development of Walkman, music enthusiasts of today are now able to immerse in their world of music anytime, anywhere.

No matter which online platforms you listen to music from, they are all compressed forms of original musical files, while MP3 is one of the compressed formats.  When the bandwidth of the internet was not as broad, MP3 attained an acceptable balance between speed and fidelity and freed music from the physicality of the record.  Enabled music to spread without mass or form, MP3 makes it possible for music to spread widely.