The story behind the “Octopus Learns to Jam with a Guitarist” headline is about an octopus interacting with a custom piano apparatus—not playing guitar with a musician. A December 8, 2025, article in Indian Defence Review identifies the octopus as Tako and the musician as Mattias Krantz. Its account says the project took six months, but the article’s linked video could not be independently checked, so those details should be treated as the article’s reporting rather than verified footage or scientific findings.
What happened in the octopus piano story?
Indian Defence Review reports that Swedish musician and YouTuber Mattias Krantz took in an octopus called Tako from a fish market with the aim of teaching it to interact with a piano. The article’s headline mentions a guitarist, but its account is about piano interaction; it does not describe Tako playing a guitar alongside a guitarist.
The article says Krantz first tried to get Tako to press piano keys. According to the account, Tako did not respond to the expected visual cues and dismantled the setup. Krantz then reportedly switched to a custom underwater apparatus built around levers rather than conventional keyboard playing.
How did the custom apparatus work?
The article describes a lever-and-reward setup: pulling a lever lowered a crab into a tube, while the apparatus also produced sound. It says the puzzle-like arrangement led Tako to pull levers to make sounds after several weeks. This is the article’s description of the demonstration, not a published training protocol or controlled test.
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What does “six months” mean?
The six-month figure is the timeline Indian Defence Review gives for the journey from taking in Tako to the reported performance. It is not presented as a measured scientific result. The article reports no controlled experiment, sample size, or research outcome establishing what Tako learned or how consistently the behavior occurred.
Does the story show that an octopus understands music?
Not on the evidence available in the article. It describes Tako interacting with a custom device that combined levers, sound, and a food reward. That account does not establish that Tako understood piano, played music in the human sense, or was responding to musical cues rather than the apparatus and reward. The article also makes broader claims about octopus intelligence and sensory cues without citing underlying studies in its text, so those claims should not be treated as independently established here.
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What remains unverified?
The article links to a video titled “I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months),” but the footage could not be independently viewed. As a result, the project details—including the setup, training sequence, and timeline—remain attributed to the December 8, 2025, Indian Defence Review article rather than independently confirmed.
The article attributes two lines to Krantz: “I can’t just apply chicken logic to my octopus and expect it to work” and “Tako may not be Rachmaninoff, but he was Tako.” They are reproduced here as the secondary article printed them; the underlying video transcript was not independently checked.
Quick Recap
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