Wu Tong modernised Chinese instrument the sheng; now he’s turning clock back

Vocalist Wu Tong was kicked out of Lunhui, the rock band he co-founded, because his bandmates thought he was spending too much time on a pet project – making the world’s first electric version of the sheng. That was in 2004, when he worked with Siemens to modernise the traditional Chinese instrument.

The sheng is a wind instrument that looks like a small bundle of bamboo, and traditionally, that’s exactly what it is: bamboo pipes sitting in a gourd base, played by blowing through a mouthpiece with a free reed.

A version of it was first recorded in the Shang dynasty over 3,000 years ago and it is considered the ancestor of the harmonica, the pipe organ and the accordion, as well as other instruments based on similar mechanisms.

Wu is the fourth generation of a Manchurian family that has been making shengs for more than 100 years and still, he didn’t have much idea of how it used to be played.