Pitch purrfect: Cats who love listening to “cat music”
It turns out our feline friends are secret music fans with very particular tastes (and no, their favourite song isn’t The Cure’s Love Cats or Elton John’s Honky Cat).
A recent study investigating music’s effects on cats published in the journal Applied Animal Behavioral Science found that while cats ignore our music, they are highly responsive to “cat music” – music that is written especially for cats. Two psychologists and a composer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison created a “species-specific” song, which as you can imagine, included plenty of cat-friendly sounds. As cats vocalise one octave higher than people, the pitch of the music was also an octave higher and the song tempo was matched to the tempo of cats’ purrs.
“We are not actually replicating cat sounds,” says lead author Charles Snowdon, an emeritus professor of psychology. “We are trying to create music with a pitch and tempo that appeals to cats.”
Next, the team played cat tunes and human tunes to 47 cats of various breeds and found that cats were significantly more positive towards cat music than our music. The cats would purr, walk towards the speaker and rub against them when played this specially-composed tune.
If you’re wondering why anyone would bother to find out the musical preferences of our feline friends in the first place, the researchers wanted to evaluate the benefits of music on animals to see if music could help socialise rescue cats in shelter who are not use to human contact.
Why not play a sample of the cat-friendly tune and let us know how they react?
Related links:
Beautiful photos from the animal kingdom that prove there’s no love quite like a parent’s love
10 adorable cats and their mini-me partners in crime
The mystery behind why cats really purr