The ‘Katzenklavier’ or also known as a cat organ or even cat piano is actually a hypothetical musical instrument that consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their own tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that they cry out loudly and in pain when a key is pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.
There is no official record of a cat organ being built, rather it is indeed described in the literature as a bizarre concept. The details of the cat organ present it clearly as an instrument cat lover might wish was a fictional horror. The instrument is used in stories that criticize the cruelty of royalty while the ‘Piganino’ that is a similar instrument to the ‘Katzenklavier’ but uses pigs, has been used to criticize the poor. Both of them are brutal musical instruments.
@mucidddd Jelas dengar kesakitan 😶 IG: Mu_chid17 #TikTokGuru #Scary #THIIN #thecolossalmalaysia ♬ Spooky piano horror scary – Sound Production Gin
It was first got invented sometime in the 17th century by none other than Athanasius Kircher. He is a German Jesuit renaissance man operating in the fields of medicine, oriental studies, and geology. The Katzenklavier was one of several wacky machines Kircher claimed to have invented while the others included an automaton statue that could listen and talk, the perpetual motion machine, and also the Aeolian harp. So many inventions that he did himself.
An 18th-century German physician named Johann Christian Reil had written that the device was actually intended to shake mental patients who had lost the ability to focus out of a ‘fixed state’ and into ‘conscious awareness’. The patient must be placed so that they are sitting in direct view of the cats’ expressions when the psychiatrist plays a fugue on the infernal instrument. The ‘Katzenklavier’ also inspired Nick Cave-narrated animation, The Cat Piano.
Sources: TikTok mucidddd, The Guardian.