Everything you ever wanted to know about the elusive 'cat piano.'
"From a comical image of cacophony, the cat piano underwent a series of unexpected functional transformations. By the 1650s it was a legendary music therapy: supposedly, an Italian prince was cured of his melancholy by the device when he found its meowing cats, triggered by driving spikes through their tails, irresistibly funny. The early-nineteenth-century medical theorist Johann Christian Reil offered a different account of the cat piano’s therapeutic powers. In his treatise on psychological cures for the mentally disturbed, Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (1803), he presented the cat piano as a hypothetical fix for dreamers unable to focus attention on the external world. As he vividly explained, the cats would 'be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument – when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals – must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.'