Ok Housecat: The Two Halves of Billy Prosise

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How a Nashville music teacher became Ok Housecat: one broken toy and one broken barrier at a time

There was a girl in Billy Prosise’s music class who had been there since kindergarten.

He noticed early on that playing a ukulele was going to be hard for her. Harder than it was for the kid next to her, harder in a way that had nothing to do with how much she wanted to play. Determined to find a fix, He filed that away and kept teaching. After all, kindergartners don’t learn ukulele; that comes in fourth grade. So he had time.

What he did with that time was think, sketch, prototype, fail, and try again over several years. Quietly, while teaching songs about the seasons and testing homemade circuit-bent toys on second graders who responded to them with that beautiful, unguarded wonder that children have, but we seem to forget as we get older.

By the time the girl got to fourth grade and the ukulele unit arrived, Prosise had something waiting for her: a 3D-printed attachment that fit over the neck of a soprano ukulele and let her play five full chords with button presses. He called it the UkeAssist. She picked it up and played along with the rest of the class without issue.

“I was ecstatic,” he said, recalling the memory of her using it for the first time.

Outside of class, Prosise operates under the name Ok Housecat, a name he chose, he’ll tell you, for purely percussive reasons. The “O” and “Hou” are round vowels. The “k” and “cat” are sharp. It has a boots-and-cats vibe, he says, the beatboxer’s building block, the drummer’s syllables for kick and snare. A drumbeat in a name. He also likes cats.

His Nashville workshop contains over 100 devices: circuit-bent Speak & Spells, Casio keyboards wired to hamster cage tubing, delay units built into soap dishes and flashlights, a sequencer inside an egg, synthesizers of his own design with names like Butter Synth and NAND Synth, and a rotating series of cat-shaped toy pianos called the Meowsic keyboard.

Each one arrives modified: extra controls, glowing eyes, and in the current Third Eye Edition, a photoresistor embedded in the forehead that bends pitch in response to light. Each one is individually named: Mulberry Midnight. Turbo Grape. Mystic Algae.

The practice is called circuit bending, and its lineage traces to Reed Ghazala, who accidentally short-circuited a toy amplifier in a metal drawer in 1966 and spent the next several decades convincing people that the sound it made was art.

In principle, you take a battery-powered electronic toy, probe its circuit board with a wire until something interesting happens, then make that interesting thing repeatable.

Prosise came to it through Ghazala’s book and Nicolas Collins’ Handmade Electronic Music, as well as years of many failed experiments. “I’ve probably broken more toys than I’ve been successful with,” he says. What he was building, across all those failed experiments, was a way of hearing. A sensitivity to what Prosise calls hunting for “the ghost in the machine.” The idea that loud, chaotic sounds are hiding inside simple devices, waiting for someone to connect the wrong two points and let them out. There is, he says, an odd beauty in a machine doing something it was never designed to do. His art loves to glorify malfunction.

“I like to see how far things will bend before they break,” he said in a 2019 interview. “It’s fun to connect things that aren’t meant to be connected just to see what happens, and to create unlistenable sounds just for the sake of hearing something you’ve never heard before.”

Then, almost in the same breath: “I like the challenge of taking the cacophony and shaping it into something you can tap your toe to.”

For Prosise, this dual characteristic greatly defines his work. In his world, both of those things are true at the same time, and have gotten him attention from the most unlikely of places:

In 2018, a curator from The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation was seeking objects that represented American innovation in unexpected places. The Henry Ford, for context, is the same institution that holds the Rosa Parks bus, Lincoln’s theater chair, and the Wright Brothers’ cycle shop. They found Prosise’s circuit-bent French-edition Speak & Spell listed for sale online. The device, which he had modified to loop, glitch, and distort in ways Texas Instruments never intended, was inscribed on the front: PANIC! / OK CHAT DOMESTIQUE! La Dictée Magique. French for “Ok Housecat.” The bilingual pun had been there the whole time, waiting.

The museum acquired it. Object ID 2019.18.1. Creators listed: Texas Instruments Incorporated, and Ok Housecat.

An incredible honor for his work, which happened without a single pitch. He did not submit an application, write an artist statement, or approach a curator at an opening. Someone found him because it was exactly what the museum was looking for. “Great luck, ultimately,” is how he describes it.

The humility is genuine, but it obscures something. Prosise was not making that Speak & Spell in the hopes it would one day find itself inside a museum, but because the circuit had something inside it he wanted to hear. The ghost in the machine came first. The Henry Ford came later.

But in his day job, the two mix like peanut butter and jelly.

His students give him off-the-wall ideas. He brings his circuit-bent instruments into the classroom, and kids who have not yet learned that some sounds are correct and others are not will tell you immediately what they think of what they’re hearing.

But the exchange goes both ways. The girl who needed a different way to hold the instrument was the same problem he works on in the workshop. A constraint that the existing design couldn’t accommodate. A need that required building something that didn’t exist yet.

“One half of my workshop is dedicated to breaking electronics to see what sounds come out,” he says. “The other half is dedicated to building tools that make playing music easier. Interacting with instruments from completely opposite directions.”

Encounter him only as a circuit bender, or only as a music teacher, or the person who makes the glowing cat piano you saw in a YouTube video, and you’ll miss the full story and think the two halves of his life stand in contrast to each other. They do not. They are expressions of the same refusal: the refusal to accept that the instrument, as given, is the final word.

He breaks things open to find what’s inside them. Builds things from scratch when nothing exists that will do. In both cases, the question is the same: what sound hasn’t been heard yet? What kid hasn’t been reached yet?

Two different quotes from a 2019 interview sum it up best:

“I CREATE to prove that I EXIST — the stagnant are invisible; the empty-handed disappear,”  he once said. Elsewhere in that same interview: “I am always creating something, inspired or not, because what I make will not exist otherwise.”

And because of that creative spirit, a child in his fourth-grade class saw a world without barriers for at least one day.

The Ok Housecat Meowsic Third Eye Edition is available via Etsy. The UkeAssist is available at ukeassist.com, with a school- and therapist-tax-exempt purchase option. The full device archive lives at projects.okhousecat.com.

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