Traditional Cantonese opera and related movies as popular sounds gave way to Mandopop, English pop and Cantopop in Hong Kong since the mid-twentieth century. After the downside of Cantonese opera, apart from the consistent sound of Cantonese opera in different traditional live performance venues, audience could still hear a part of it on television, a new rising popular mass medium.

This paper investigates the participation of pop music idols in fragment scenes of Cantonese opera on television in Hong Kong in the 1990s when Cantonese opera was supposed to, have faded out from its popular position. Other than selections performed by traditional Cantonese opera singers, pop music idols such as Andy Lau and Vivian Chow were also included. These idols were not necessary to use traditional voices but their own pop singing voices, which represented a new trend of popular music in Hong Kong. Such variation in singing Cantonese opera allowed the traditional sound to touch the new generation of pop music audience, as the idols’ voices were influential and could easily be recognized. 

This paper suggests, besides the fact that television served as a medium to transmit the sound of Cantonese opera to a new era and a new generation of audience, voices, especially pop voices, also served as media for the same function. Pop voices could be a collective of the idea of new culture, new trends, popular image, and young age. These elements are keys to attract the new generation of pop music audience. The participation of pop voices hence transmitted a part of the traditional Cantonese opera sound to the new generation of audience in the late twentieth century, and to assist in sustaining the sound of Cantonese opera in the soundscape of Hong Kong in a fragmented way.