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How a Musician Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in Six Months
Something strange happened in a Swedish apartment six months ago. A musician decided on a fish market that would challenge everything we think we know about intelligence, music, and connection. He walked past rows of seafood on ice, stopped at one particular tank, and chose to save a life instead of season dinner.
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What came next sounds impossible. Mattias Krantz brought home an octopus, not as food, but as a student. He wanted to teach piano. Friends laughed. Scientists probably rolled their eyes. Yet Krantz believed something most people miss when they look at creatures so different from themselves. Potential lives everywhere, even in eight boneless arms floating in salt water.
When a Fish Market Becomes a Rescue Mission
Markets selling live seafood tell quiet stories of endings. Creatures wait in tanks, their fates already decided by price tags and hungry customers. Krantz walked through one such market and saw something else. He saw a possibility swimming in circles.
He named his new companion Tako, borrowing from takoyaki, that popular Japanese dish made from octopus. Irony hung heavy in that choice. Tako had been destined for someone’s plate, marked for consumption like thousands of others pulled from the ocean each day. Instead, he became part of an experiment that would captivate millions online and force people to reconsider what counts as consciousness.
Krantz set up an aquarium in his home and began designing what no one had built before. An underwater piano. A keyboard that could survive salt water. A musical instrument for a creature with no bones, no ears, and certainly no prior experience with melody or harmony.
Money, time, and endless frustration went into creating something most people would call absurd. Yet Krantz kept building because he understood something about teaching that schools often forget. Learning happens when curiosity meets opportunity, regardless of how many legs or tentacles the student brings to class.
Six Months of Trial, Error, and Tentacles
Early attempts failed spectacularly. Krantz tried light-up keys first, thinking visual cues would guide Tako toward specific notes. Tako ignored them. Next came fake crabs placed inside the piano, hoping to trigger hunting instincts. Tako found them uninteresting. Krantz even tried creating vibrations in the tank, attempting to translate sound into something an earless creature could sense.
Nothing worked. Days turned into weeks of watching Tako swim past the keyboard, showing zero interest in becoming a musician.
Scientists know octopuses cannot hear. They lack the anatomical structures humans use to process sound waves. Yet they feel vibrations through their skin and can detect pressure changes in water. Krantz needed to build an entire musical system around these abilities, creating not just an instrument but a whole new way of experiencing music.
He designed a waterproof pull-lever keyboard. Instead of pressing keys down like human pianists do, Tako could pull levers that would trigger the keys from below. Each pull created a note. Eight tentacles meant eight potential notes playing at once.
Building the hardware solved only half the problem. Getting Tako to actually use the instrument required something else entirely. Motivation. Desire. Some reason for an octopus to care about making sounds underwater.
Krantz invented what he called a crab elevator. Each time Tako pulled the correct lever, a mechanical system lowered a treat slightly closer to him. Pull the right sequence, get the food. Ignore the keyboard, go hungry. Simple operant conditioning dressed up as music education.
“I almost forgot sometimes that Tako was destined to become someone’s dinner and now we’re making music together,” Krantz shared in his YouTube documentation of the process.
Slowly, through repetition and trust, Tako began playing. He learned which levers brought rewards. He discovered patterns. He started pulling multiple levers in sequences that, while not quite Mozart, created something resembling melody. Krantz would pick up his guitar and jam alongside his eight-armed student, creating improvisational pieces that millions would eventually watch online.
Whether Tako understood music remains unclear. Whether he felt joy in creation or simply enjoyed the treats is unknowable. Yet he learned. He adapted. He performed an activity that most humans struggle to master, even with years of lessons and opposable thumbs.
Eight Arms, Eight Mini Brains, Infinite Potential
Scientists have spent decades studying octopus intelligence, and their findings keep surprising us. Each discovery chips away at our comfortable assumptions about consciousness and capability.
Octopuses possess intelligence comparable to human three-year-olds. They solve puzzles. They use tools. They remember individual human faces and react differently based on past interactions. Aquariums know them as escape artists, famous for squeezing through impossible gaps and showing up in neighboring tanks when keepers arrive in the morning.
Even more remarkable is their neural structure. Each of their eight arms contains its own cluster of neurons, functioning somewhat independently from the central brain. Imagine having eight separate processors working on different tasks simultaneously while one central system coordinates the whole operation. Krantz put it perfectly in his video when he explained his motivation for the experiment.
“I’ve always wanted to teach an animal piano. In theory, octopuses have incredible potential. They’re as smart as a three-year-old, amazing problem-solvers, and each of their eight arms has its own mini brain. It’s like having eight pianists in one body.” Krantz explained.
Research continues to reveal more about these creatures we so casually consume. Genetic studies show octopuses share certain intelligence genes with humans, suggesting our mental capabilities may have deeper evolutionary roots than we realized. Brazilian scientists have even documented what appears to be dreaming in octopuses, observing color changes and movements during sleep that mirror their waking behaviors.
People are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about ethics. If octopuses dream, solve problems, recognize individuals, and learn complex tasks, should we still eat them? Does intelligence create moral obligation? Can we justify consuming creatures whose consciousness might be more similar to ours than we want to admit?
The Evolution of Non-Vertebrate Brains
Tako’s story matters beyond entertainment value or viral video metrics. His ability to learn music points toward bigger questions about minds and awareness.
Neuroscientists see octopuses as valuable research subjects precisely because they evolved intelligence along a completely different path than vertebrates did. We share a common ancestor from over 500 million years ago, yet we developed complex brains through entirely separate evolutionary processes. Studying how their neurons work gives us new perspectives on our own.
Nikolaus Rajewsky, scientific director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology, explained the importance clearly when discussing octopus neuroscience research.
“The octopus is a special invertebrate. By studying how the brain functions in octopuses, we can maybe learn new tools to interfere with our nervous systems or to understand our nervous system better.” Rajewsky told GEN
Every time Tako pulled a lever and heard a note, he demonstrated learning. Each successful sequence proved memory. His progression from confusion to competence showed problem-solving in real time. Whether you call that consciousness or merely complex biological programming becomes harder to distinguish with each passing discovery.
We like drawing sharp lines between human and animal, thinking and reacting, consciousness and instinct. Tako’s piano playing blurs those lines into something messier and more honest. Intelligence exists on spectrums we barely understand, wearing forms we rarely recognize.
From Food to Family
Krantz originally planned to return Tako to the ocean after the experiment ended. Six months of teaching, filming, and music-making would conclude with a release back into the wild. Freedom seemed like the right ending for a rescue story.
Plans changed. Living together created bonds that neither species expected. Tako became domesticated in ways that made ocean life dangerous. He learned to trust one human completely, which would leave him vulnerable to predators and fishermen. His new skills had zero survival value in natural habitats.
So Tako stayed. He lives peacefully in Krantz’s home now, no longer a student or experiment subject but a companion. They still make music together, jamming in impromptu sessions when the mood strikes. An octopus and a human, creating sound in ways that break every rule about what collaboration should look like.
Some might call keeping Tako selfish. Others see it as taking responsibility for a relationship that changed both participants. Perhaps domestication is just another word for family built across impossible distances.
Lessons We Can Pull From Eight Tentacles
Tako’s journey from dinner to pianist carries wisdom worth examining. His story asks us to look harder at the world we move through daily.
Patience produces results where force fails. Krantz could have given up after the first week, the first month, the hundredth failed attempt. Instead, he kept adjusting his approach, kept trying new methods, kept believing in potential others couldn’t see. Every breakthrough in teaching happens this way, whether the student has two legs or eight tentacles.
Intelligence exists in forms we don’t expect. We build narrow definitions of smart based on skills we value, tests we design, and standards we create. Then an octopus plays piano underwater, and we have to expand our categories. How much other intelligence floats past us unnoticed because it doesn’t speak our language or share our shape?
Motivation matters more than method. All the perfect teaching techniques meant nothing until Tako had reason to care. Finding what drives someone to learn beats having the fanciest curriculum. Connection fuels growth. Relationship enables change.
Every being has untapped potential waiting for the right teacher. Tako wasn’t special among octopuses. Krantz wasn’t a marine biology expert. Yet their meeting created something neither could have built alone. We walk past potential students every day, creatures and humans both, never knowing what music we might make together if we stopped long enough to try.
Your Call to See Differently
Question what you consider intelligent or worthy. When you look at animals, what do you see? Food? Decoration? Background scenery? Or minds working through problems we can’t imagine, building solutions in languages we never learned?
Your assumptions about consciousness limit what connections you make. Octopuses weren’t supposed to learn piano. Children from certain backgrounds aren’t supposed to master calculus. People with disabilities aren’t supposed to create art. History keeps proving these supposed-to’s wrong, yet we keep building new ones.
Try patience with someone learning something new. Maybe your student, your child, your employee, your spouse. Everyone you know is trying to master some skill that feels as impossible to them as piano felt to Tako at first. Remember that learning looks like failure right up until the moment it becomes success.
Recognize and nurture potential in unexpected places. Stop waiting for perfection to arrive fully formed. Start believing that growth can happen anywhere, in anyone, given the right conditions and enough time.
Make music with the world around you. Not just literal music, though that works too. Make whatever creation brings you joy and share that joy with others. Build unlikely partnerships. Teach impossible students. Try experiments that sound absurd. Krantz could have bought an octopus for dinner that day, and nobody would have questioned his choice.
Instead, he saved a life and got a keyboardist. Strange trades sometimes become the best deals we ever make. Open your eyes to possibilities swimming past you in unlikely places, and maybe you’ll find your own eight-armed genius waiting to learn your particular kind of music.