Can you teach an octopus to play the piano?

YouTuber, tech wizard, and sound engineer Mattius Krantz has been creating weird and wonderful sounds for years. From his crazy and at times beautiful (and slightly heartbreaking) water piano to milking spiders to make guitar strings (yes, that is a real sentence), some of his videos are wild in a creative, chaotic way. Mattius has just released my favourite of his, where he spent six months trying to teach an Octopus to play the piano.

Whilst not quite My Octopus Teacher, if you have 20 minutes and want to experience the highs, lows, and quietly fantastic technology and theory that went into trying to train the octopus to play, I highly recommend it. Tako, as the octopus is called, is saved from a fish market and increasingly seems to troll Krantz by either playing with the piano and then ignoring it, or just not caring altogether. As one comment suggests, “in this video an octopus pranks a YouTuber to make increasingly complex underwater pianos”, and I quite enjoy that reverse viewpoint.

Delightfully, Tako and Mattius are now friends, and Tako is a permanent member of his household. Mattius Krantz’s YouTube channel is a great place to see music technology and sound engineering turned on its head. I highly recommend it.

Support Higher Plain Music

Higher Plain Music is part of the Higher Plain Network – a one-man indie media project. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. In return, you’ll receive additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and free downloads. You can also donate using PayPal. Sharing the website helps too or using the affiliate buy now links on reviews. I receive a few pence per Amazon sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. I’d love to make this a full-time media network and your support can make that happen. Thank you.