Musical Interlude

Being reminded of Renaissance rap led me to an early sampling keyboard, for which knowledge we have Athanasius Kircher to thank: "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."

Wikipedia(with another picture!) quotes Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin describing the mechanism of the Katzenklavier otherwise: "It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow."

The resident kitties have been placed in a protection program until the lads stop carrying around "pitch-determining" hammers.