As a boy, Michael Hearst loved "Carnival of the Animals," the Camille Saint-Saëns suite in which each movement conjures up a different creature.

Mr. Hearst grew up to become a composer in his own right who also collects unusual musical instruments. Inspired by "Carnival of the Animals," he wanted to do something similar but with his own twist. "I'm going to pick the weirdest animals on the planet and use all my weird instruments," he said.

He matched animals with instruments and composed a tune for each. One for the honey badger, for example, is played on a bowed wooden instrument called a daxophone. Another for a glass frog, a translucent-bellied amphibian found in Central and South America, features a glass armonica—invented by Benjamin Franklin and made up of bowls.

Michael Hearst performs 'Songs for Unusual Creatures' with his band mates Ben Holmes, left, Alyssa Lamb and Jonti Miman. Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal

The result, "Songs for Unusual Creatures," first launched as a book and album, and next week, it comes to PBS, as a 10-episode online-video series spotlighting aye-ayes, elephant shrews, blue-footed boobies and other oddities.

Each episode features a visit to the animal paired with one of Mr. Hearst's original compositions. He is joined in the segments by guest performers, including the Kronos Quartet; Margaret Leng Tan, a toy pianist who worked with the contemporary composer John Cage; and armonica player Cecilia Brauer.

The series, which Mr. Hearst described as a mix of Animal Planet and Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts," didn't get off the ground until he and his collaborator, Joe Beshenkovsky, a film editor known for his work on "This American Life," posted a pilot video to YouTube.

"Just put it out in the world," Mr. Beshenkovsky said. "That was really the motivation, just to do something fun and try this little hybrid."

It got nearly 90,000 hits, catching PBS's attention. "It was funny and irreverent but also informative and had real artistic merit," said Matthew Vree, programming director at PBS Digital Studios.

Michael Hearst, dressed as an angler fish. Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal

PBS paid them $55,000, enough for Mr. Hearst, who lives in Brooklyn, to hire musicians but quashing dreams of overseas trips to work with foreign fauna.

Instead, in the pilot, he heads to Duke University's lemur center in Durham, N.C., where he meets an endangered aye-aye face-to-face. He watches the nocturnal creature climb about, feeds it a worm and learns from the center's director that in the wild, the Madagascar primate taps tree trunks with his long middle finger to listen for hollow spots where grubs might be.

What might that sound like, Mr. Hearst asks. Tap, tap, tap, replies the Kronos Quartet, as they imagine the aye-aye finding its food and moving through the trees at night.

The quartet also appears with the sea pig as Mr. Hearst travels to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. This time, in addition to underwater footage and preserved specimens, the video shows how the song is composed, with the quartet performing the original tune and then improvising with sea pig-inspired sounds, Mr. Hearst said.

Violinist David Harrington said the music perhaps explores the relationship humans might have with the creatures. "It's kind of creatively just having some fun, human beings having this opportunity to reflect on another species, another creature."

The audience enjoys the show. Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal

In addition to the aye-aye, the videos feature such animals as the bilby, a desert-living marsupial from Australia; the blue-footed booby, a marine bird that nests in the Galapagos and other islands in the Pacific Ocean; and the Chinese giant salamander, the world's largest amphibian.

"Depending on the episode, we might lean more on the music aspects of it, or we might lean more on the animal aspect," Mr. Beshenkovsky said. "It's kind of this fluid hopping back and forth, and trying to teach kids about both aspects."

Ms. Tan is paired with the Jesus Christ lizard, whose ability to run across water gives it its name. She described Mr. Hearst's music as a perfect match for her quirky work. Her toy Kawai piano in particular conjured up the lizard.

"Just the sound of the instrument was already so evocative, I didn't have to do anything," she said.

The studios' videos, each roughly 8 minutes, will be viewable on YouTube, and the team describes the endeavor as "PBS quality with a YouTube sensibility," Mr. Vree said.

"Frankly, it was a chance to make PBS relevant to an audience that we might not normally be reaching," he said, "a generation of people that in a lot of cases doesn't watch broadcast television."