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Anyone who loves music knows how therapeutic it can be, and now researchers have shown that a good melody may have the same affect on cats. But they think our human-tunes suck.
To work out whether cats could respond to music, scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Maryland, both in the US, composed 'cat-centric music'.
"We looked at the natural vocalisations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices," lead author Charles Snowdon told Jennifer Viegas for Discovery News.
In human music, the drumbeat often mimics our heartbeat, and so in the cat music, the team instead replicated the tempo of things that cats would find interesting - one song featured a purring tempo, and another featured a suckling tempo.
"And since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music," Snowdon told Viegas. You can hear the results, Spook's Ditty, Cosmo's Air and Rusty's Ballad, over at the team's website 'Music for Cats', and trust us, they don't sound as bad as you're imagining.
In the study, the cat songs were played back to 47 domestic cats, and the researchers watched how the felines reacted compared to when they listened to two classical human songs - Johann Sebastian Bach's Air on a G String and Gabriel Fauré's Elegie.
Publishing in the journal Applied Animal Behavioural Science, the team reports that the cats didn't respond at all to the human music. But when the cat music started up, they became excited and started approaching the speakers, often rubbing their scent glands on them, which means they were trying to claim the object.
Read more here. (Science Alert)
Sample 1 - Spook's Ditty
Sample 2 - Cozmo's Air
Sample 3 - Rusty's Ballad
Music Homepage
If you have a cat, please test the samples out and post your results.
To work out whether cats could respond to music, scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Maryland, both in the US, composed 'cat-centric music'.
"We looked at the natural vocalisations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices," lead author Charles Snowdon told Jennifer Viegas for Discovery News.
In human music, the drumbeat often mimics our heartbeat, and so in the cat music, the team instead replicated the tempo of things that cats would find interesting - one song featured a purring tempo, and another featured a suckling tempo.
"And since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music," Snowdon told Viegas. You can hear the results, Spook's Ditty, Cosmo's Air and Rusty's Ballad, over at the team's website 'Music for Cats', and trust us, they don't sound as bad as you're imagining.
In the study, the cat songs were played back to 47 domestic cats, and the researchers watched how the felines reacted compared to when they listened to two classical human songs - Johann Sebastian Bach's Air on a G String and Gabriel Fauré's Elegie.
Publishing in the journal Applied Animal Behavioural Science, the team reports that the cats didn't respond at all to the human music. But when the cat music started up, they became excited and started approaching the speakers, often rubbing their scent glands on them, which means they were trying to claim the object.
Read more here. (Science Alert)
Sample 1 - Spook's Ditty
Sample 2 - Cozmo's Air
Sample 3 - Rusty's Ballad
Music Homepage
If you have a cat, please test the samples out and post your results.
