[h3] Cat piano [/h3] [blockquote][img]vny!://www.boingboing.net/images/_images_cat-piano.jpg" alt=" Images Cat-Piano" align="left" border="1" height="200" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="368"][br clear="all"][/blockquote]Amazing inventor [a href="vny!://chronicle.com/free/2002/05/2002052804n.htm"]Athanasius Kircher[/a]designed this cat piano in in the 17th century. Kitties with differently-pitched voices were placed in the pens and then "triggered" to meow with a sharp poke in the ass. From Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650):
In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat's tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.
[a href="vny!://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=116"]Link[/a]
