the cat keyboard project
summer 2024. instagram reels (and a soldering iron)
last summer i went all-in on reels for my artist project. for some reason, this series was my biggest success, totaling to ~2.5 million views. while it does involve me modifying electronics, that part should be really unimpressive to anyone who knows about circuitry. in spirit, this was a social media campaign first and foremost!
this is a meowsic, a toy cat keyboard made by b. toys. it's a toy keyboard (ages 2+) with five instruments (including pitched meowing!), drum loops with adjustable tempo, and a microphone. it's a very common toy. i bought mine at target. due to its abundance, cheap price, numerous musical features, and simple circuitry, it's a common target for circuit-bending—modifying media electronics like musical instruments or digicams to intentionally mess with their output, often for a glitched effect. i wanted to get into this sort of thing, and there are many, many tutorials online for hacking this exact keyboard, so i bought one. let's tell instagram reels about it!
the tutorial i decided to use didn't glitch its output or anything; it just added an audio jack and a volume knob. as simple as it gets, right? however: i did not know how to solder and did not understand what the circuitry i would be building actually did. if i really don't know anything, might as well be honest about it, right? so i filmed everything—every setback, every tiny step, every misjudgement i made—with full transparency.
i ended up making five whole videos just on building the project. i must reiterate that what i was trying to do is REALLY EASY as electronics projects go, and should have taken maybe two videos max. i just knew straight up nothing about this process and got stuck on the most basic of issues, which i made sure to share on camera as they happened. as a result, each video showed a whole lot of doing but not much progress.
part of me was concerned that people wouldn't want to watch me spin my wheels for three weeks, but oh my god people ate it up! i think there was a lot of my own personality that people were there for, and the authenticity in my process was probably nice to see as well.
after actually finishing the project, i had to record with it obviously—no doubt people would be wanting that after the whole song and dance! cat-meowing covers of songs seemed like a good way to go, so first i made sure to bait engagement ask which one people wanted me to cover first. oh i got hundreds of responses. couldn't keep up. overwhelming. but i still picked one and executed—runaway by kanye west.
at this point i was very tired of the project. did not have it in me to do another cover. but we learn and we grow and i will stand stronger next time :3