Seeing the Cat-astrophe
In 1919 the Columbia Orchestra recorded "A Cat-astrophe": a cheerful tune that keeps getting interrupted by shrieking. The Public Domain Review's note credits the cries to Howard Kopp and William Daniel and doubts a real cat was involved. Below is the whole record with its spectrogram. Watch the cries go past.
Height is pitch, 0 to 4,000 Hz; time runs left to right, just under three minutes. The band plays the steady horizontal lines. The cries are the tall bright slanted shapes: each jumps up to about 3,000 Hz in an instant, then slides down over a second or two. Yellow rings mark the 18 big ones I picked out by eye. Tap the picture to jump.
A cat piano without a cat
Each key below copies the shape on the record: a buzz and a little hiss that leap up and then slide down. No animal is involved, which is more than can be said for the cat piano Athanasius Kircher described in 1650.
Keys play C major from middle C. Tap, or use the A to K keys on a keyboard.
The note's facts
| PDR | Source | |
|---|---|---|
| Stravinsky's "Cat's Lullabies", written 1915, first performed in Paris in 1918 | Wikipedia, Berceuses du chat: composed 1915–16 in Clarens; first heard in Paris, Salle des Agriculteurs, 20 November 1918 | matches |
| "Me-ow"'s "universal appeal" (April 1919 Talking Machine World) inspired window displays at the Chalmers Co., Newark, and the Southern California Music Co., Los Angeles | The magazine, read on the Internet Archive scan: both windows are there, black cardboard cats in Newark and a three-foot grey cat with a moving mouth in Los Angeles | matches |
| The PDR ties this to the Columbia "Me-ow" by the Jockers Brothers | The report names no label. Between January and June 1919 the magazine's lists show "Me-ow" from Victor, Pathé, Emerson and Empire, and the Newark window was built around Victrolas, which are Victor machines. The tune, Mel B. Kaufman's one-step, was everywhere that season. | broader |
| Zez Confrey's "Kitten on the Keys", 1921 | Wikipedia, Zez Confrey: written in 1921, after he heard his grandmother's cat walk on her piano | matches |
| The 1919 Le Matin joke; Georges Duval's "concert miaulique" | Not checked |
What stands on what
| Item | Source |
|---|---|
| The recording | Library of Congress, National Jukebox, item jukebox-660522; its file name reads Columbia A2855, matrix 78264. Under the Music Modernization Act, US recordings published before 1923 entered the public domain on 1 January 2022 (Wikipedia). Re-encoded here at 48 kbit/s. |
| The spectrogram, cry times | My analysis of that file: 1,024-point FFT, 0–4 kHz. The 18 marked cries were picked by eye from zoomed spectrograms. |
| Talking Machine World | Vol. 15 (January–June 1919), Internet Archive talkingmachinewo15bill, full text |
| Kircher's cat piano, 1650 | Wikipedia, Cat organ (citing Musurgia Universalis) |
| The PDR note | "It's 'A Cat-astrophe'! (1919)", The Public Domain Review |