German physician Athanasius Kircher designed a horrific musical instrument in the 17th century that was entirely powered by the screams of tortured cats.

A keyboard that turned pain into pitch

Athanasius Kircher’s notorious “cat piano” was imagined as a row of cats whose cries could be arranged into a melody. In the account, each animal was placed in a separate cage according to the pitch of its voice. Pressing a key made a sharp point prick a cat’s tail, prompting a yelp; the different cries supplied the notes.

The mechanism was less like an instrument that produced sound directly and more like a crude, cruel trigger system: the keyboard selected which animal would cry. Its proposed musical order depended on the cats’ voices being distinct enough to sort into a scale.

Why prescribe noise for melancholy?

In the seventeenth century, “melancholy” referred to a broad condition of sadness or dejection, not simply the modern clinical diagnosis. Kircher presented the contraption as a way to jolt a melancholy listener out of that state through an intense, startling spectacle. The idea reflects a period in which physicians and thinkers could treat sound as an influence on the passions—and in which the boundaries between medicine, entertainment, and mechanical ingenuity were not sharply drawn.

The cat piano is remembered less as a practical cure than as an unsettling thought experiment about control: a keyboard promises the order of music, but its notes come from living animals in distress. That contrast is what makes the device so memorable—and so disturbing.