The cat piano was the work of German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher who documented it in the Musurgia Universalis in 1650. The piano was designed to raise the spirits of an Italian prince. The musician would select cats whose voices were at different pitches then arrange them in the pens accordingly. As Kircher reported: "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."
