Cats vocalize at higher frequencies than humans, so they often ignore our music. Now two scientists have made songs specifically for cats. (Audio here.)
A description of the music, from a story at Discovery:
“We looked at the natural vocalizations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices,” Snowdon said. “We incorporated tempos that we thought cats would find interesting — the tempo of purring in one piece and the tempo of suckling in another — and since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music.”
It’s pretty cool-sounding stuff — like some sort of very chill, violin-studded ambient music made by someone whose internal metronome is keyed to the frequency of a purr.
Did the cats like it? Slightly better than classical music, when the scientists tested it, according to their press release:
The cats were significantly more positive toward cat music than classical music. They began the positive response after an average of 110 seconds, compared to 171 seconds for the human music. The slow responses reflected the situation, Snowdon says. “Some of them needed to wake up and pay attention to what was going on, and some were out of the room when we set up.”
(That lovely CC-licensed photo of a cat on a mixer board comes courtesy Vladimir Agafonkin’s Flickr stream!)