Click on an image for a RealAudio 3.0 sound sample.
Instead of the planned drawing of a Raokkae, I decided to do a series of musical furries. (For an interesting discussion on this topic, go to DejaNews and search for the subject "Musical Instruments and Furries" in the newsgroup alt.fan.furry in December 96.) The first two in the series (which will hopefully be an ongoing one) are shown above. The one on the left is a banded linsang, a member of the civet family, playing a kindof mouth organ called a "khaen", from Thailand and Laos. On the right is a bat-eared fox playing an African mbira (sometimes called a "thumb piano", but as you can see, the fox has no thumbs.)
The other two images shown here are old sketches of (quasi-furry) aliens playing musical instruments. Lee Shu, on the left, is a Zireen harpist, and the two players on the right are Thrinnyng, Treemin and Renza, playing a Thrinn musical instrument composed of a series of bells played with mallets. (The Thrinn instrument employs an unusual musical scale of seven equally spaced notes per octave.)
There are some obvious difficulties with certain species of furries playing certain kinds of instruments. For instance, getting the right embouchure for a transverse flute or end-blown flute would be difficult for some species, and impossible for others. Although Tolkien mentions a "tipsy cat that plays a five-stringed fiddle," it is doubtful that a cat could play any kind of string instrument with a fingerboard. If you've played the violin you know how difficult it is to play if you don't keep your fingernails trimmed. A cat's claws would get in the way.
